Karl Bodmer's Contemporaries: George Catlin and Charles Bird King

George Catlin and Charles Bird King are among other nineteenth century artists, who committed themselves to depicting the North American Indian. While in the States on the first leg of his journey with Maximilian to the Plains, Bodmer probably viewed the Indian portraiture of both King and Catlin.

In 1832, the same year that Prince Maximilian officially began his expedition to North America, George Catlin began his travels along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Unlike Bodmer, who did not return to the subject matter of the North American Indian upon his return to Europe in 1834, George Catlin, while resigned to the notion of the "doomed" Indian, remained committed throughout his lifetime to the plight of dwindling native populations through his passionate writing and painting. He continued to exhibit works and publish texts in support of the Indian up until his death in 1872.

Starting in 1821, eleven years before Catlin and Bodmer began their respective explorations of the frontier, and up until the year 1842, Charles Bird King painted nearly one hundred Indian visitors to his Washington D.C. studio. Unlike Bodmer and Catlin, King painted his subjects removed entirely from their natural environment. King's paintings were most appreciated and promoted through the efforts of Thomas L. McKenney, chief of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and James Hall, a prolific writer of the time. King's fame increased with the McKenney and Hall lithographs, yet many of his paintings were not seen, by the artist's request, until his death in 1862.

If nothing else, the paintings of these two Americans fueled Bodmer's enthusiasm for his own adventure. Just as Bodmer's sure draftsmanship resulted in an unsurpassed gallery of the early West -a pictorial record upon which American studies of that western land and its inhabitants can still solidly depend, artists, such as Catlin arid King, were also creating a history in the present for the future.

Emily Martin