Abstract
THE February issue of Man is a Catlin centenary number, and Mr. L. J. P. Gaskin recalls that on February 1, 1840, George Catlin, artist, traveller and ethnographer, opened his North American Indian Museum and Gallery in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London (see also NATURE, January 27, p. 158). Catlin was a self-taught artist and ethnographer. By contrast, Paul Kane (1810–71) was an artist by training and profession, and in his home in Toronto he had been familiar with the appearance and dress of Indians of various tribes who visited that seat of government. After travelling in the United States and studying in Europe, he set out on the first of his two expeditions among the Indians in 1845, when he spent five and a half months in recording portraits of "the principal chiefs, and their original costumes to illustrate their manners and customs, and to represent the scenery of an almost unknown country". In 1846 Kane started on his second and more important journey, which occupied two years and six months and extended across the continent to Fort Victoria. He did not keep a journal during his travels, and his book "Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America"(1859) appears to have been written from memory.
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Pioneers in Amerindian Portraiture. Nature 145, 255–256 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/145255d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/145255d0