The Red Man’s Bones: George Catlin, Artist and Showman by Benita Eisler (review)

George Catlin trained as an attorney, but by the early 1820s was making his way as a painter. The following decade, he would go on to explore a vast area of the Great Plains, becoming the first artist to attempt a comprehensive study of Native Americans before their cultures were irrevocably disrupted. He produced hundreds of portraits, landscapes, and scenes of life in the West and showed them in innovative exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Always hoping (in vain) to sell his collection to the government and urging it to form a national museum, Catlin influenced countless viewers with his “Indian Gallery”; his images and writings contributed significantly to understandings of American Indian life.

Eisler’s book is a biography of Catlin rather than a scholarly study of his art and career. His story (which intertwines with a remarkable array of American notables, history, and landscape) is intrinsically fascinating. Nonetheless, even though this book is packed with detail, it ultimately fails to live up to its subject. Sparsely illustrated, confusingly footnoted (when at all), too dependent on anecdote and sensationalism, and lacking the authority of more scholarly Catlin books, this text may be engaging for readers with little prior knowledge of the artist, but it does not offer much to those who already have some understanding of this exceptional American painter and his substantial achievements. Better choices are the profusely illustrated George Catlin and His Indian Gallery (Norton, 2002) which accompanied a Smithsonian exhibition, and Brian Dippie’s excellent Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage (Nebraska, 1990).

Eisler’s book fleshes out more of the artist’s early life and pre-western activities than most Catlin studies do. The author raises many interesting points and little-known facts, but her narrative is also at times confusing since it often skips back and forth chronologically. She also seems unduly preoccupied with Catlins sexuality (frequently noting his male friendships and lack of time spent with his wife and children), as well as the sexual components of the Mandan O-kee-pa ceremony, a brutal coming-of-age ritual Catlin was privileged to witness and portray before the tribe was virtually wiped out by smallpox in the late 1830s. A tendency toward purple prose in places (as on page 113 where she describes the green of Catlins painted grass as “radioactive” and his landscapes as “airless . . . waiting for a coming apocalypse: an explosion, a blinding light, and a mushroom cloud”) indicates an overstriving for effect. Catlins work, while not academically accomplished in the traditional sense, needs no such hyperbole to be extraordinary and compelling, and academic readers will find better considerations of that fact elsewhere.