ryside and now and then produced masterful works. They painted portraits, landscapes, houses, ships, still lifes, tavern signs, pictures of funerals. In many respects their works are similar to the paintings of the early limners. Most folk paintings have a certain degree of flatness. The figures have hard edges and clear boundaries marking the limits of the subject in space. Another feature of folk art is that the painter s vision is direct. Folk artists avoid sophisticated poses, striking estures and props. They display artistic innocence and spontaneity, he most gifted folk artist of the nineteenth century was Edward Hicks (1780-1849), a coach and ornamental painter and a prominent Quaker preacher in Newtown, Pennsylvania. His work represents an exceptional example of folk unprofessional art. His best-known work is a naive romantic Utopia The Peaceable Kingdom. This was his favourite theme and he returned to it over and over again, producing between 1816 and 1849 nearly one hundred versions.West exerted a strong pull on the imagination of nineteenth-century Americans. The life of the Indians, the bitter conflict between Indians and settlers, daily life in the new raw communities provided subject matter of great novelty. Many artists went west to paint Indian life. The first important painter of Indians was George Catlin (1796-1872). The works that Indian painters produced before him have only historic or ethnographic interest. George Catlin was brave enough to venture into Indian encampments and spent eight years among the Indians of the Great Plains. He was obsessed with the desire to record pictorially the still living culture of the American Indian, to snatch from hasty oblivion ... a truly lofty and noble race. With great sympathy he recorded the customs and habits of the various tribes and produced many portraits of Indian chiefs and other individuals who impressed him. He developed a swift, direct field style that enabled him to depict as many as half a dozen subjects a day.general the American attitude toward the Indian before the nineteenth century had been unequivocal - the only good one was a dead one. By 1830 the Indians had either been brutally exterminated or driven beyond the Mississippi, and in the vastness of the western plains they no longer posed an immediate obstacle or threat. In their remoteness they could even be thought of in Romantic terms, as examples of natural man, even as heroic and tragically doomed. Their exoticism in appearance and mode of existence added to the Romantic interest, and there was some anthropological and ethnographic interest in their customs. Travel in Indian country was not especially dangerous, since the tribes tended to honor their treaty commitments, and travelers did not find it difficult to live among them, as the literary and visual evidence seems to indicate. Not until the white man began to move westward again did the period of Indian Wars end the short interlude of peace. After the annexation of California and the discovery of gold in 1848, the inevitable urge toward unification of the continent led to a national policy of extermination. Meanwhile those who were interested could collect their data. Catlin became and has remained identified in the public mind as the Indian painter through his long years of devoted study, the authenticity of his observation, the great body of his production, and most of all his publications and the impassioned espousal of...
