| |
| | George Catlin and his Indian Gallery - a Review by Donald Goddard |
 | | Catlin grew up, like Cole, in Pennsylvania, studied law and practiced it briefly in Connecticut, studied art and became a painter of portrait miniatures in Philadelphia, was elected a member of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1824 and the National Academy of Art in 1826, then moved to New York City. |
 | | Catlin was jailed for his debts in 1851, his two daughters were taken from him, and he was driven into bankruptcy in 1852, when the entire Indian Gallery ended up in the Philadelphia boilerworks owned by Joseph Harrison, Jr., a builder of railroads (particularly in Russia) who acquired the gallery by paying off Catlin's creditors. |
 | | Even more than in most of Catlin's portraits, the flesh and soul of the figure exist somewhere between the vague turmoil of the sky and the very specific patterns, colors, and surfaces of his quilled and feathered ornaments, which assume a kind of hyperreality in their subtle turning toward and away from the light. |
| www.newyorkartworld.com /reviews/catlin.html (1442 words) |
|