Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage by Brian W. Dippie (review)

144 Western American Literature Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage. By Brian W. Dippie, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. xix + 553 pages, illus., $50.00.) George Catlin’s story has been told many times before but never, to be sure, as well as in this excellent book. Essentially, Dippie contextualizes Catlin’s lifetime quest asself-appointed pictorial “historian” to the plains Indians; thus, the artist’s various trips west during the 1830s and the resulting images he produced (the usual focus of Catlin scholars) are, for Dippie, only points of departure. These accomplished, the broader story is how Catlin publicized what he had seen, drawn, painted, and written, and how his Indian Gallery, public lectures, and numerous pleas for government patronage were received in the East and, after 1839, in Europe as well. More than that, this is not Catlin’sstory alone;it isalso that of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Indian Historian to Congress, initially friendly to Catlin but ultimately his harshest and most self-serving and petty critic; E. G. Squier, archaeologist and critic of School­ craft; and Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Catlin’s artistic competitors also figure prominently, Seth Eastman and John Mix Stanley most especially, but Charles Bird King, Paul Kane, and others make appearances as well. Catlin seems a perfect centerpiece for what emerges as a moral tale of competition, self-promotion, and intrigue surrounding the question of patron­ age—both private and public—for the arts and for knowledge about the West. To Dippie, Catlin’s experiences were, during the fifteen years prior to 1853, “one of the great sagas of enterprise and thwarted ambition in the annals of nineteenth-century American art.” In addition, the artist’s personality de­ mands our further attention when understood within the cultural and political contexts of midcentury America, both ante- and post-bellum. The romantic Catlin seemed ever to plunge, headlong, into the immovabilities of a nation driven by populist attitudes toward art and wracked by sectional antipathies, a place where Indians lost their allure as the nation moved from Catlin’s 1830s through the Civil War to the Little Big Horn and the Gilded Age. To Catlin, such matters needed only to be surmounted: “It was as though each setback were to be overcome by mounting a new project twice as implausible. ... In despair one day, his hopes soared the next, and he fantasized not success, but a triumph so complete it would confound his critics, humble his enemies, and shake the world to its foundations.” Such an outcome never came to pass, of course, but as a thorough cultural historian, Dippie details the obstacles. Exhaustively researched, compellingly argued, and beautifully illustrated, Catlin and His Contemporaries is a model scholarly work; it comprehensively asserts Catlin’s importance, both to American art and American cultural history, and ultimately makes its case most effectively. In every way, an excel­ lent book. ROBERT THACKER St. Lawrence University ...