Continuing Studies Course Offers Deeper Look at Issues Behind Museum Exhibition

A recent exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), featured the work of 19th century painter George Catlin, who chronicled the life and customs of American Plains Indians.

The exhibition of more than 120 paintings and artifacts, titled George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, is the first major show of his work in about 30 years. And while it offers a comprehensive retrospective of the painter’s work, a Rice School of Continuing Studies course went beyond the art to examine one of the most important issues in American history.

“The Rice course gave us the opportunity to draw on the expertise of the Houston community to talk about the exhibit, but also to jump out into other issues regarding the American Indian,” says Emily Neff, the museum’s curator of American painting and sculpture. “The fate of the Indians in the 19th century is a crucial chapter in American history, and it has repercussions even today.”

The course, George Catlin, Native American Culture, and the American West, included eight discussions, two of which dealt directly with the Catlin exhibit on display at the MFAH. Catlin (1796–1872), Neff explains, was a lawyer and mediocre self-taught painter until the 1820s, when he encountered a delegation of Indians in Philadelphia and decided to make it his life’s work to record their manners and customs.

“No other artist up to that point in history had devoted his life and art to the American West and to documenting the Plains tribes,” notes Peter Marzio, MFAH director. “The exhibition conveys Catlin’s regard for the rich heritage of these tribes and inspires our admiration for it today.”

From 1830 to 1836, Catlin followed the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition, visiting 50 tribes living west of the Mississippi in territory representing present day Oklahoma to North Dakota. He was the first artist to record the Plains Indians in their own territories. Catlin admired them as the embodiment of the ideal of man living in harmony with nature, and he later grew increasingly critical of U.S. government policies toward the Indians.

“In the 18th and 19th centuries, the assumption was that the Indian was a noble savage doomed to extinction because of the progress westward,” Neff says. “It was very much a part of Catlin’s culture that the Indian would disappear.”

Catlin assembled his paintings of Indians as well as Native American artifacts into a show he called his Indian Gallery, which he toured in the United States and Europe. He was a controversial artist in his own time because his shows—precursors to Buffalo Bill Cody shows—were regarded as exploitative and ethically challenged. They included the performance of rituals and dances by Indians and images of gruesome tribal ceremonies.

Catlin’s work became history almost immediately, Neff notes. For example, only four years after painting portraits of members of the Mandan Indians, the tribe was nearly extinct, and within two decades of his paintings depicting buffalo roaming the plains, the bison population had shrunk to 1,000 from about 60 million.

The opening of the American West and the impact that it had was one of the topics considered in the Continuing Studies course. Rice professor John Boles lectured on the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Louisiana Purchase, and the implications of the efforts to discover what the West held in store for the nation. Broader ideas of the American West also were considered in the course. University of Houston assistant professor Kathleen Brosnan discussed the American frontier myth, its role in the idea of Manifest Destiny, and its enduring hold on the imagination of this nation.

Other topics in the course included the artwork of Catlin’s artist–explorer contemporaries, like Frederic Remington and Seth Eastman; a review of government Indian policies; and an examination of major works of art and artifacts created by the Plains Indians themselves.

“Really delving into these issues,” Neff says, “is something that we can do in a course like this that we can’t do in the exhibition alone.”

—Dana Benson