Wild American Savages and the Civilized English: Catlin’s Indian Gallery and the Shows of London

1. Introduction: Authenticity and ArtificeGeorge Catlin was the outstanding painter of nineteenth-century American Indian life, and a flamboyant showman. Brian Dippie has shown that the two roles were intimately connected. Catlin had a grand design to record “doomed” Indian cultures for posterity. “I have flown to the rescue of their looks and their modes,” he pronounced from London in 1841. White settlers were exterminating them, “yet, phoenix-like, they may rise from ‘the stain of the paint...