The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

[Carol]

This week we will be discussing Chapters 3 “Morse at the Louvre” & 4 “The Medicals”. Due to the holiday I will discuss part of CH 3 tonight and follow up on Monday with more.

While France was Morse’s primary destination, when he first arrived in Paris he only stayed for a few months before heading to Italy, where he immersed himself in the Italian classics of art and architecture for over a year. On commission from clients, Morse made copies of many Renaissance works. That's primarily what funded his European trip. Since there was no photography yet and most Americans had never seen the classics, there was a brisk sales in copies -- and lots of bad copies floating around. Thus, some Americans would commission their favorite artists to make copies of specific paintings when they went to Europe. We know that in one case Morse was paid $100 to do a copy of Raphael's School of Athens, a famous fresco in the Vatican.

While in Italy, Morse explored the Vatican galleries and Rome's famous museums and monuments, made tons of notes and sketches, and developed an obsession for the Italian masters. He also met a fellow American, author James Fenimore Cooper, who would become a lifelong friend and a key comrade during the difficult journey Morse was about to take to create the most important painting of his career. 

Also in Florence, Italy they also made friends with Horatio Greenough http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia... who was an American sculptor and made a bust of Morse. http://www.britannica.com/bps/media-v...

Cooper and Morse return to Paris in the fall of 1831 as the “best of friends” after their stay in Italy. (They had met 7 years earlier at the White House meeting Lafayette.)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
Lafayette, 1825 in his older years

While it seems that everything came so easily for Cooper, the opposite seemed true for Morse. At 42 years Morse had spent half his life as an artist. He started by painting portraits on ivory which was not profitable. He decided that “he was made to be a painter” and travelled to London, met Benjamin West http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin... who inspired him to become a history painter. He became a student of Washington Allston.

In 1815 he returned home, still painting portraits. A few years later he married Lucretia Pickering Walker http://locutus.ucr.edu/~cathy/artists... who gave birth to a baby boy and days later died, followed by deaths of his father and his mother. Morse decided to board his remaining children with relatives and left for Paris.

Even though Romanticism was the popular during this period, Morse wanted nothing to do with the emphasis on drama, color and vigorous brushwork. Morse preferred 16th and 17th century European works.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830 (included himself in the painting next to liberty armed with a musket)

Cooper took his family and nephew to Paris. When Cooper settled in Paris with his family, he instantly became “America’s most famous author.” Not since Benjamin Franklin had an American been so welcomed and liked. Some even hailed him as “American Walter Scott.” Cooper was writing his 14th novel and was financially making about $20,000 that year.

Cooper told Morse how impressed he was by the improvement of his work and commissioned him to do a copy of a Rembrandt. However, Morse had larger ambitions in mind. He had a big idea for a new project that could bring an important piece of European culture back to America. Morse wanted to paint a giant view of the Salon Carré ("Square Room") of the Louvre. Painting whole galleries of famous museums was not completely uncommon at the time and Morse was inspired by The Tribuna of the Uffizi by German painter Johann Zoffany, who did a painting of the inside of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy from 1772 to 1778.
 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
The Tribuna of the Uffizi, Johann Zoffany

Morse would be the first American to do a grand panorama of the inside of the Louvre, and he viewed himself as something of a cultural evangelist, exporting one of the best parts of Europe back to his compatriots.

As if that wasn't ambitious enough, in his painting Morse decided to completely rearrange the artwork hanging on the walls of the Salon Carré. Instead of the contemporary French Romantic works that were hanging there during his time, Morse replaced them with classic European works from throughout the Louvre. He scoured the museum for weeks looking for the best and most important paintings among the 1,250 works that were hung at the Louvre in 1831.

Ultimately, Morse decided on 38 paintings, most of them from Italian Renaissance masters, including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, and Veronese. Because the paintings were hung from floor to ceiling, Morse had to build his own portable scaffolding that he was allowed to bring into the Louvre and move around wherever he needed to get a better view of each specific painting so that he could faithfully render a miniature copy on to his massive 6-foot by 9-foot canvas.
Starting in the fall of 1831, Morse and his scaffolding were at the Louvre seven days a week from open to close to work on the project. As a result, Morse himself became an attraction at the Louvre. Cooper wrote that Morse had "created a sensation." Writing to New York art critic William Dunlap, Cooper stated, "Crowds get round the picture, for Samuel has made a hit in the Louvre." 

Cooper became Morse's daily companion throughout the project. Cooper would spend his mornings writing and then in the afternoon he'd walk a mile and half from his Paris residence to the Louvre, crossing the Seine in the process. At the Louvre, he would invariably "find Morse stuck up on a high working stand." By the spring of 1832, Cooper understood how much pressure Morse was under to create a great work and to finish by August 10, when the Louvre would close for the summer. Morse planned to be on his way back to America by September.

http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/...
click on paintings to see a close up view

Question: What seems to have drawn these men of different backgrounds and professions to each other? What kind of support did Cooper offer Morse during the creation of Gallery of the Louvre, and how did Morse include the Cooper family within the painting?

[Heather]

I wish now, that I had time to read this book with you all. I don't know the answers to your questions, Carol, but I have learned a lot just from your posts.

I didn't know Morse painted himself in Liberty Leading the People. Is that relatively common knowledge? Or something that is learned from the book?

Interesting.

I love the panorama of the Louvre. Wow, what a creation!

[Susanna - Censored by GoodReads]

Delacroix painted himself in Liberty Leading the People.

I don't know if it's common knowledge; I learned it in an art history class in college.

[Heather]

duh! You're right, Susanna. Wow, how did I do that? I'm very familiar with the painting and I knew who painted it. Just blanked I guess. Thank you for the correction!

[Carol]

Chapter 4 -- Paris was the world's center for medical education. It’s medical schools were considered the best in the world, and drew students from around the globe, including America.  The finest and most skilled surgeons practiced and taught medicine to thousands of medical students, who were able to accompany French doctors on their daily hospital rounds. Oliver Wendell Holmes and dozens of other Americans enrolled and learned about evidence-based diagnosis and other modern trends in the practice of medicine. Holmes wrote home of his toil and the exhilaration in “being at the center of things.”

In contrast, most American medical schools did not require any hospital experience.  Many American doctors in the early 19th century did not attend medical school at all; they “apprenticed” with a local doctor, and after a period of time were considered practicing physicians. 

Hotel Dieu -- http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broug...

lithograph of cholera in Paris, 1832 --
http://www.lindahines.net/blog/wp-con...
After the cholera epidemic of 1832, Paris numbered twelve hospitals, which “provided treatment for 65,935 patients.  In comparison, in Boston, Mass General and McLean together cared for fewer than 800 patients.”  And treatment in all Paris hospitals was free.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/cho...
“Cholera in Paris” wood engraving by Daumier, Illustrated in: Fabre, Antoine François Hippolyte. Némésis médicale illustrée, recueil de satires. Paris, Bureau de la Némésis médicale, 1840.

[Heather]

Interesting facts about the medical field comparing America to Paris.
Wasn't Leonardo da Vinci the first to actually paint or draw the human body that medical hopefuls could study his drawings? Or am I off base? Did they use real cadavers to paint and study the human body later in Paris?

I hope I'm not creating a tangent. Not reading the book, I have to ask questions. Great posts, Carol!

[Carol]

Heather wrote: "Wasn't Leonardo da Vinci the first to actually paint or draw the human body that medical hopefuls could study his drawings?"

Yes, da Vinci had to know everything about the human body. Not content just to draw the body as he saw it from the outside, he strove to understand the human form from the inside. How far would he go to increase this understanding? Farther than was acceptable or even legal at that time. He cut up cadavers, and studied organs as well as skeletal substructures—all in an effort to draw and paint more accurately.

Da Vinci's Fascination with Dissection and the Human Body (Discovery)
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/doing-dav...

CH 4, pg. 116 --
In Paris there was an abundance of cadavers due to disease and poverty, 2/3 were carried off to dissecting rooms. Beyond the hospitals cadavers were readily available and cheap -- about 6 francs for an adult (or $2.50) and less for a child. Sanderson rented a room near the hospitals, described seeing carts "arrive and dump a dozen or so of naked men and women, as you do a cord of wood upon the pavement", these were distributed to dissection rooms.

Wendell Holmes wrote of how he and a Swiss student split the cost of their "subject" and by evening had "cut him into inch pieces." Thus all parts of the body -- nerves, muscles, organs, blood vessels, and bones -- be studied, and this, Holmes stressed, could hardly be done anywhere in the world but in Paris.

There is also a comparison of Paris with America in regards to cadavers and female patients. CH 4, page 115 --

In the US, because of state laws and public attitude, dead bodies for medical study were hard to obtain and consequently expensive. Until 1831, trade in dead bodies in MA had been illegal, which led numbers of medical students of earlier years to become grave robbers. The new MA law permitted only the use of corpses buried at public expense, which meant mainly the bodies of those who died in prison. NY, too, had such a law, and other states --CT, ME, NH, IL, TN -- would follow.

Re: Female patients
In Paris students had ample opportunity to examine female patients as well as men. This was not the case in America, where most women would have preferred to die than have a physician -- a man -- examine their bodies. It was a "delicacy" nearly impossible to surmount, and as a consequence a great many American women did die, and young men in medical training in America seldom had any chance to study the female anatomy, other than in books.

[Carol]

There is so much happening in CH 4 that I did not post. (You really must read this book!) But in this chapter there is a focus on four students -- James Jackson Jr, Wendell Holmes, Mason Warren, and Henry Bowditch were quite close, lived near each other and later all studied with P. C. A. Louis.

J. Mason Warren (1811-1867) https://www.countway.harvard.edu/chm/...

Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (1808-1892)
The American physician Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (1808-1892) did research on chest diseases and established the first board of health in Massachusetts. He was also an ardent antislavery crusader. http://www.answers.com/topic/henry-pi...

James Jackson, Jr. (1810-1834)
The life of this New England medical student of a century and a half ago (1810-1834) is reconstructed chiefly from the writings of his father, the second Hersey Professor of Medicine at Harvard, and of contemporaries, particularly his classmate Oliver Wendell Holmes. After a first-class American medical education he went to Paris to become the favorite pupil of P. C. A. Louis. He wrote a monograph on cholera and, as an original member of the Paris Society of Medical Observation, described a physical sign useful in the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis. While abroad he met Thomas Hodgkin, Astley Cooper, and other "greats." In addition to providing information about medical education and medical science in the early nineteenth century, his letters and other contemporary documents reflect his qualities, which are those that remain perennially desirable in medical students and physicians: warmth, an insatiable desire to learn, and productive scientific curiosity. A memoir by his father, James Jackson, Sr. -
http://books.google.com/books/about/M...

P. C. A. (Pierre Charles Alexandre) Louis (1787–1872) http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion/...

(posted Oliver Wendell Holmes in the first post)
bk: Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris by William C. Dowling
http://books.google.com/books?id=-Pu2...

[Carol]

CH 5 American Sensations

Change was coming . . . Atlantic crossing by steamship, communication between far-distant points, Louis Daguerre daguerrotype, European monarchs brought down by political upheaval that began in Paris and Paris transformed -- all happening in less than 20 years, and the year 1838 marked the beginning.

Morse returned to NYC, but it took an extra month by going on a sailing ship instead of a steamship. Of those who left in 1830 to venture to Paris, only 2 returned -- Samuel Morse and Charles Sumner and not until 1856. Both had different purposes from their previous voyage.

One original adventurer who didn’t go home -- George Peter Alexander Healy http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/full...

“Little Healy” from Boston http://collections.terraamericanart.o... still working on becoming a master of portraitures. At 21yrs he arrived at the Louvre and thought the artworks were “overrated.” But after trying to copy a Correggio, he was humbled. He was accepted as a student of Baron Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835). http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
Antoine-Jean Gros

In his first serious training, he was the only American among the students but was well received which was somewhat unusual (usually hazing was tradition.) Drawing was the foundation for everything (most of day was devoted to drawing from a live model.)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
Thomas Couture

Fellow student -- Thomas Couture (1815--1879) turned over Healy’s drawing and sketched the resting model, the sketch so strong, full of life, so easily done, that (Healy) never had a better lesson.” He and Healy became fast friends, and was joined by another friend, Savinien Edme Dubourjal (1795-1853) who also made miniature portraits. Gros had studied under David, famous for his paintings of Napoleon, but in his 60s he was in deep despair, “he had out lived his popularity and his heart was broken.” On June 25, 1835 Gros drowned himself in the Seine.

In 1837 Healy accepted to do portraits in London, a year later he set off for Paris on a painting tour to Switzerland on foot, covering 20 to 30 miles a day. Word of his talent spread, in 1838 he painted portrait of American minster to France, General Lewis Cass and his wife Mrs.Cass which won Healy his first medal at the Paris Salon.

In 1838 he return to London to witness Queen Victoria’s coronation & introduced himself to
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
John James Audubon (above), who in his youth had painted portraits to make ends meet. Audubon was in London to supervise the production of the fourth and final volume of The Birds of America and was living with his wife on Wimpole Street. After protesting that he was too busy to sit for a portrait, he finally said “yes”. http://www.lib.niu.edu/2002/oi021102....

While painting his portrait, he shared with Audubon that he had fallen in love with Louisa Phillips to which Audubon replied that the only real happiness in life was a good marriage. In the spring of 1939, he proposed to Louisa and married in a quiet ceremony and then headed off to Paris to do a portrait of King Louis-Phillippe for General Cass, the King agreed to sit, he was easy to talk to and happy to recall his years in the US.

Healy and Louisa moved into a tiny apt on the Left Bank near the Luxembourg Gardens http://www.museeduluxembourg.fr/en/le...

Two rooms, one for a studio and the other their bedroom. Healy rose early every morning and worked all day, on rare occasions when he did take time off it was usually to go to the Louvre to study a Rembrandt or Titian. He continued to paint portraits and was able to move to the other side of the river on the rue Saint Lazare to a larger and more proper place (for his growing family and his distinguished sitters.) In 1842 he departed to America at the request of the King to make a copy of Gilbert Stuart’s full length portrait of Washington (in White House). http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/furni...

Along with the copy, Healy returned with portraits of President John Tyler and Senator Daniel Webster. In 1845 Louis Phillippe asked Healy to return to the US to paint a portrait of the seriously ill Andrew Jackson along with a series of portraits of living American statesmen for his private gallery at Versailles.

page 146 --“It was a commission such as no American artist had ever received until the, not Stuart or Copley, not Charles Willson Peale, or Trumbull or Sully.”

Healy actually painted 2 portraits of Andrew Jackson, one for Louis Phillippe and one for his daughter-in-law. He was at Jackson’s bedside when he died on June 8th. He continued his travels in the US painting Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams.
portrait of Healy himself http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/...

daguerrotype http://www.mfa.org/collections/object...

LaFayette Database of 37 portraits painted by Healy in the Louvre- http://musee.louvre.fr/bases/lafayett...

[Carol]

After 6 years, Morse returned to Paris traveling with James Gordon Bennett. It was Morse’s desire to paint a historical scene for the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington. He applied but no decision had been made. In 1834 Morse joined in the Nativist movement, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic movement, where he saw the American way of life threatened with ruination by the hordes of immigrant poor bringing with them their ignorance and their religion. Under the name “Brutus” he wrote a series of articles for the New York Observer regarding how democracy was to survive. He was asked to run as mayor of New York in 1836, and was defeated.

When Morse learned from Washington that he wasn’t chosen to paint one of the historic panels at the Capitol, his world collapsed. He took to bed and was quite ill. Morse gave up painting entirely. “Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been cruel to me. I did not abandon her, she abandoned me.”

He began working on his idea for his telegraph. He became greatly frustrated by the French government and decided to take it home to America. Morse Telegraph -- http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/education/t...
The Telegraph -- The History http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkafFx...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia....
Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre
Morse was friends with Daguerre; both were painters who had turned to inventing. Daguerre was a master illusionist with light. He had built his own large theater, “The Diorama”, and put on his show from opening day in 1822 where Parisians came flocking. The audience sat on a revolving platform, so it was as if the scenes were passing before them and they found it almost impossible to believe what they were seeing was not real. It marked an “epoch in history of painting.” (pg. 157)

Daguerre had been experimenting with reproducing visual images with an older colleague Joseph Nicephore Niepce who died. Daguerre finally accomplished his goal and the daguerreotype was the birth of photography. Although some saw it as the death of art.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
Joseph Nicephore Niepce

Thumbnail history of the Daguerrotype - http://daguerre.org/resource/history/...

Morse sent to his brother (n the New York Observer) on April 20, 1839, the first news of the daguerrotype to appear in the US. He travelled home and saw to it that Daguerre was made an honorary member of the National Academy -- the first honor Daguerre received outside France.

[Heather]

Fascinating! Thank you so much, Carol, for all of your effort and hard work in bringing such interesting information! Now I really want to read the book!

I didn't know Morse was a painter. He is so well known for the Morse Code. Am I way off here? That is some good information. Thank you again!

[Carol]

Samuel F.B. Morse’s 1822 painting The House of Representatives (oil on canvas, 86 7/8 × 130 5/8 in., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), depicts the Members gathered for an evening session lit by an oil-burning chandelier. Morse shows an unusually peaceful moment in the Chamber, emphasizing the harmonious, classical architecture and the soft golden light of the chandelier. Morse used portrait studies for each individual shown in the work, including 6 Supreme Court justices, 68 legislators, President James Monroe and the Chief of the Pawnee tribe. This mixture of the branches of government and the Native American leader furthers Morse’s optimistic vision of national harmony.
http://thegood.files.wordpress.com/20...

All the “important” legislators look like drone penguins. Morse highlighted the true men of action and innovation. The lighting technician lighting the hall’s chandelier is the central, high contrast compositional focus:
http://thegood.files.wordpress.com/20...

The technicians on the side are highlighted with brilliant light:
http://thegood.files.wordpress.com/20...

And a Pawnee Chief up in the gallery looks on silently:
http://thegood.files.wordpress.com/20...

more paintings by Morse --
http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/page...

[Carol]

the end of Ch 5

“The spring of 1845, just a year following Morse’s triumph at Washington, marked the appearance in Paris of a decidedly different variety of American, the first wave of American curiosities or exotics -- “les sensations americaines” -- who were the cause of great popular commotion.”
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/image...
Daguerrotype of P. T. Barnum (flamboyant New York showman) and his tiny protege Tom Thumb in 1845

Barnum (1810--1891) made himself famous a few years earlier when he opened his American Museum on the corner of Broadway and Anne Street in NYC from 1841 to 1865. By chance he had discovered a “little person” (then referred to as a midget) who was not 2 feet high and weighed 16 lbs. and was 5 years old. Barnum renamed him Tom Thumb (or General Tom Thumb), fitted him in an miniature uniform similar to Napleon. Initially he paid the boy’s parents $3 week but quickly changed it to $50 week due to his success.

First Barnum travelled to London where it was a “decided hit,” including a special performance for her Majesty Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace. Next stop, Paris. Barnum knew it would be in high demand -- “the French are exceedingly impressionable.” He hired a new auditorium (seating capacity of 3,000), hired an orchestra and made the rounds of the Paris newspapers. Tom Thumb stole the show, sporting a top hat, riding in a fancy miniature carriage with 4 grey ponies and 4 tiny liveried coachmen. The crowd broke into cheers for “General Tom Pounce.” He also gave a private performance for King Louis-Philippe at Tuileries Palace. Shop windows were displaying miniature statues of Tom Pounce in plaster or chocolate, there were songs about him and one cafe even changed it’s name to Tom Pounce.

[Carol]

After Barnum came a pale, slender 16 year old American who walked on the stage at the Salle Pleyel and seated himself at the piano on the evening of Wed., April 2, 1845. His name was Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829--1869) but was called Moreau. He had been studying music in Paris for 4 years and in musical circles there was much talk about him. In the audience was his mother, his teacher - Camille Stamaty (who had studied under Mendelssohn). Also waiting attentively were two of the most adored pianists of the time, Sigmund Thalberg and Frederic Chopin. Paris devotees of music had turned out in force, every seat was full, in response to a printed invitation to hear the debut of “Young Moreau Gottschalk of New Orleans.”
http://www.gottschalk.fr/Galerie/Port...
bio -
http://www.louismoreaugottschalk.com/...

Musical prodigies were not uncommon in Paris -- they were even something of a tradition -- but Moreau was an American prodigy, and that was new. Chopin himself came backstage afterward. Greeting Moreau, according to one account, he exclaimed in French,”Good, my child, good, very good. Let me shake your hand once more.” But Moreau’s sister Clara would later say Chopin had placed his hands on the boy’s head, as though conferring a benediction, and said, “I predict that you will become the king of pianists.”

music -- "The Banjo" by Louis Moreau Gottschalk -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNsG5U...
Gottschalk - Lively Tarantella- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n08Jkn...
Gottschalk - Creole Eyes, Danse Cubaine -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj-xwV...
Gottschalk : Le Cri De Délivrance (Battle Cry Of Freedom)-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIVpKv...

Illustrations and caricatures in newspapers were generally drawn to show the manners but also the virtuosity of Gottschalk.
http://www.gottschalk.fr/Galerie/Illu...

[Carol]

Almost 2 weeks after the Gottschalk debut, came the American painter of Plains Indians, George Catlin, who brought an entire gallery of his paintings (more than 500 in total) as well as a party of painted and feathered real life “Ioways.” It was the most memorable visit of an American painter to Paris of all time.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
Artist George Catlin (1796--1872)
bio- http://www.scienceviews.com/historica...

Catlin’s story was like that of no other American artist. In 1832, Catlin (inspired by Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and The Prairie especially) began his journey up the Mississippi River into Native American territory to “record a vast country of green fields, where men are all red.”

Catlin’s eventually visited 50 tribes. Two years later he ascended the Missouri River to what is now the North Dakota/Montana border, where he spent several weeks among indigenous people who were still relatively untouched by European civilization. He visited 18 tribes, including the Pawnee, Omaha, and Ponca in the south and the Mandan, Hidatsa, Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine, and Blackfeet to the north. There, at the edge of the frontier, he produced the most vivid and penetrating portraits of his career. During later trips along the Arkansas, Red and Mississippi rivers, as well as visits to Florida and the Great Lakes, he produced more than 500 paintings and gathered a substantial collection of artifacts.

Catlin took his collection across the Atlantic for a tour of European capitals. As a showman and entrepreneur, he initially attracted crowds to his Indian Gallery in London’s Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, and in Salle Valentino, Paris. Louis-Philippe talked of his own experiences in America. “Tell these good fellows that I am glad to see them. I have been in many of the wigwams of Indians of American when I was a young man, and they treated me everywhere kindly, and I love them for it.” Louis-Philippe and his 2 younger brothers in 1797-98 left Pittsburgh and descended down the Mississippi to New Orleans, just as Catlin did.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas, 1844/45, Oil on canvas, 28 x 22 7/8 in., Paul Mellon Collection at the National Gallery of Art

It was not just the subject matter of Catlin’s paintings that appealed the audience but the direct strength of his work, the raw color and a simplicity of form very on naive. The paintings had much the same fascination for the French as the Indian tales by James Fenimore Cooper. This was the “wild America” they envisioned. While Catlin was out on the great plains, Delacroix ad been in Morocco.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
George Sand, 1838

George Sand described how the whole combination of the paintings, the artifacts and then the dances had gripped her as nothing in her experience.

“At first, I felt the most violent and unpleasant emotion that any show has ever given me. I had just seen all the frightening objects of the Catlin Museum, primitive tomahawks . . . and deformed skulls spread on a table, of which several showed the mark of a scalp, bloody spoils of war, repulsive masks, paintings showing hideous scenes of the initiation to mysteries, extreme corporal punishments, tortures, great hunts, murderous fights . . . when the noise of sleigh bells which seemed to be announcing the coming of a herd of cattle told me to run for my seat, I was ready to be frightened, and when I saw appear in the flesh these painted faces, some blood-red as if they were seen through a flame . . . these half nude bodies, magnificent models of statuary, but also painted in many colors . . these bear claw necklaces which seem to tear the torso of those wearing them . . .I admit that I started being afraid and my imagination took me to the most lugubrious scenes of The Last of the Mohicans. It was even worse when the savage music gave the signal for the war dance.”

So moved by the whole show she went back the next day bringing several others. She was sure that Catlin’s paintings were far more important than the public realized, and Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire were of like mind.

Baudelaire, as important as any French critic, loved especially Catlin’s portrait of Little Wolf and another of a Blackfoot chief, Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat, for the way Catlin had captured “the proud, free character and noble expression of these splendid fellows.” As for Catlin’s color, something of the mysterious about it delighted him. Red, “the color of blood, the color of life, ” abounded.

http://americanart.si.edu/images/1985...
I-o-wáy, One of Black Hawk's Principal Warriors, 1832, oil on canvas, 29 x 24 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum

http://americanart.si.edu/images/1985...
Jú-ah-kís-gaw, Woman with Her Child in a Cradle, 1835, Ojibwe/Chippewa, oil, 29 x 24 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum

http://americanart.si.edu/images/1985...
Shon-ta-yi-ga, Little Wolf, a Famous Warrior, 1844, Iowa, oil, 29 x 24 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum

Little Wolf’s wife died suddenly and unexpectantly from tuberculousis. She was buried in the cemetery of Montmatre and Little Wolf was shattered and “heartbroken.” The story was in all the papers and Chopin mentioned her in a letter to his family that summer.

Sadly Catlin’s wife died on July 28, 1845 of pneumonia. Sadly he shipped her remains home for burial and tried to console his 4 children ranging in age from 3 to 10. He spent his time divided between his easel and the children. Then his 4 children were struck with typhoid fever. His 3 daughters survived but his son George did not.

[Carol]

FYI -- I eliminated all images which were not working but left the links.

[Heather]

I read this yesterday when you posted it but failed to comment. It is so nice to have a long day, put on some music and have a history lesson, too!