the Indian cause in his traveling exhibition and show, Made up of paintings, Indian costumes, and artifacts, and, at times, troupes of live Indians, the whole managed with great showmanship, the show toured the United States and Europe for fifteen years.in Wilkes-Barre , George Catlin practiced law in the surrounding area before turning to miniature and portrait painting in 1821, after which he plied that trade in Philadelphia, Albany, Richmond, and Washington for almost a decade. He had been captivated by the sight of a group of Indians in full regalia in the streets of Philadelphia and, years later, wrote: The history and customs of such a people, preserved by pictorial illustrations, are themes worthy of the lifetime of one man , and nothing short of the loss of my life shall prevent me from visiting their country, and of becoming their historian. By 1830 he was in St. Louis doing portraits of Indians, and two years later he started, out with an American Fur Company party taking the first steamboat up the Missouri 2.000 miles to Fort Union. Catlin spent almost eight years among the Indians, was the first artist to penetrate the Far West, and amassed close to six hundred paintings, which he assembled as his traveling Indian Gallery. His Letters and Notes of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841) went through many editions and, aside from its ethnographic value, became a source book for artists who had never seen a live Indian. Conscious of the red man s doom, Catlin had made good his vow that through his art, phoenix-like, they may rise from the stain of a painter s palette. His lack of training may actually have been a boon, for a sophisticated artist might have found the conditions under which he had to work too difficult, and those who came later and were trained could not help seeing in set formal patterns. Still, Catlin s paintings lack the intrinsic interest to match the fascination of the subject as Audubon s did. This is not to say that he lacked talent; despite his shortcomings he had an artist s eye for the dramatic sight or moment, for composition, pattern, and linear movement. His scenes of Indian life, though often not much more than short hand notations, are full of vivacity. native genre tradition was continued by Eastman Johnson, who painted domestic city life, country occupations and recreations, and the world of children. He was a more entertaining storyteller than his predecessors, his paintings were more technically expert than Mount s and Bingham s but inferior in depth of feeling. Most of his genre paintings are overslick in execution, sentimental emotionally and anecdotal in subject. The Johnson s most significant work is the Old Kentucky Home. It is one of the few canvases of the period that touched on social issues.1859, when Eastman Johnson painted his famous Old Kentucky Home, originally entitled Negro in the South, America was embroiled in the slavery issue, and in that context this idyllic, sentimental scene seems like wishful thinking. Johnson had been studying art abroad from 1849 to 1855, first in Disseldorf, then in the Hague, where he came to admire the Dutch seventeenth-century artists, especially Rembrandt; the soft light and vaporous shadows in Old Kentucky Home owe much to Rembrandt s inspired chiaroscuro. Johnson had been in Europe too long, for it was naive at this time for a Northerner to conceive of happiness as compatible with servitud...
