Ruka Hussain (MSt History of Art and Visual Culture)

Over the course of five visits to the American West in the 1830s, George Catlin (b.1796) created a collection of Native American portraits, artifacts, animal and landscape paintings, which he toured using a range of performance strategies such as lectures and audience participation. My paper characterises Catlin’s work as occupying a point of juncture between European and American romanticism, and between literary/artistic Romantic movements and burgeoning scientific disciplines. By considering the spatial-temporal experiences of particular forms of visual culture and their degrees of scientific, historical or ecological realism, I chart the ways in which Catlin’s gallery engaged (historical) imagination and sewed lines between ecology, anthropology, and history, and how he exploited the particular forms of painting to depict and engage the viewer in the socio ecosystems of the American West. Developing an argument about contemporary romantic empiricism, I demonstrate how Catlin’s work offered his viewers direct access to nature, a quasi-empirical encounter of their own.