The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (32 page)

Catlin admired, even revered, the king, in a way few other Americans could have, knowing as he did what such adventures demanded in “energy of character and skill.” And here he was, the king of the French, “taking the poor Indians of the forest by the hand in his palace, and expressing to them the gratitude he had never lost sight of. …”

Such thoughts were rapid, Catlin wrote, but often recurring during his solitary walks in Paris.

In the midst of such reflections I often strolled along in a contemplative mood through the wilderness throngs of boulevards, the central avenue and crossing-place—the aorta of all the circulating world—to gaze upon the endless throng of human beings sweeping by me, bent upon their peculiar avocations of business or pleasure, of virtue or of vice, contrasting the glittering views about me with the quiet and humble scenes I had witnessed in various parts of my roaming life.

In the midst of this sweeping throng, knowing none and unknown, I found I could almost imagine myself in the desert wilderness, with as little to disturb the current of contemplative thoughts as if I were floating down the gliding current of the Missouri in my bark canoe. …

Long descriptive accounts of the Iowas at the Tuileries Palace appeared in the Paris papers, but when Catlin opened his Indian Gallery, or Museum, at the Salle Valentino a few days later, the exhibition was not as well attended as hoped, nothing like the continuing clamor over Tom Thumb, who by this time was appearing nightly at the Théâtre du Vaudeville. Soon, though, as noted in
Galignani’s Messenger
, the exhibition
was attracting “crowds of savants and others,” and by late May the paintings and the dances of the Iowas were “drawing full and fashionable audiences,” both in the afternoons and evenings.

It was not only the subject matter of Catlin’s paintings that appealed, but the direct strength of his work, the raw color and a simplicity of form verging on naïve. The paintings had much the same fascination for the French as the Indian tales by James Fenimore Cooper. This was the America they imagined, “wild America,” and that they found almost irresistible. The Iowas themselves, said the
Journal des Débats
, seemed to have come to Paris “for the very purpose of serving as living commentary to the well-known novels of the famous Cooper.”

The old yearning among the French intelligentsia for the primitive and exotic, the Romantic idolization of the unspoiled “natural man” that began with Rousseau, had much to do with the response, particularly among writers and artists. In the early 1830s, at the time Catlin was out on the Great Plains, Eugène Delacroix had been in Morocco sketching and painting Arab chieftains and lion hunts, and Delacroix was among those who now spoke in praise of Catlin,
le peintre américain
. 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 … flattened 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.

With the roar and commotion, the “delirious rage” of the dance under way, she became utterly terrified. “I was in a cold sweat, I thought I was going to witness a real scalping of some vanquished enemy or a scene of torture which would be even more horrible.”

The carefree Parisian audience, who has fun being surprised, laughed around me, and this laughter seemed to me that of the spirit of darkness. I came to my senses only when the dance stopped and the Indians were again, as if by miracle, showing this expression of simple good-heartedness and cordiality which makes them look like better men than us.

So moved was she by the whole show, she went back the next day, bringing several others. She was sure 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 and the green of wooded mountains and immense grass plains. “I find them again singing their melodic antiphon of the very faces of these two heroes.”

The Catlin Indian Gallery, said a review in the
Constitutionnel
, was “one of the most curious collections that has ever been seen in Paris, as much because of the naïve character of the painting style as because of the originality of what it represents.” Still, the American painter’s lack of skill and finesse, the review continued, made it especially arresting.

Mr. Catlin paints quietly from the start, by placing one color which is right and pure next to the other, and it doesn’t seem he goes back over his work either through glazing or impasting. But his feeling is so deep and in some ways so sincere, his execution so naïve and so spontaneous, that the effect, rightly seen, is rightly expressed.

Seeing the collection, said another journal, the
Observateur
, one found it hard to believe it was all the work of just one man. Catlin was compared to Herodotus in his journeys to chronicle remote peoples, praised for his “remarkable power” as a lecturer. Knowing little French, he spoke in English only and his manner was described as “coldly polite, his face severe and thoughtful, like the face of a man who has seen many things.”

The approval was far more glowing and emphatic than what Catlin received in London, and further, the time in Britain had been cast in shadow toward the end by a death among the Iowas. The infant daughter of Little Wolf and Female Bear that Walks on the Back of Another had died during a visit by the whole company to Scotland. And so the responses of Paris meant that much more.

But just as all seemed to be going so right in Paris, Little Wolf’s wife herself suddenly and unexpectedly died of tuberculosis. She was buried in the cemetery of Montmartre and Little Wolf, shattered, “heartbroken,” went every day to sit by her grave. The story was in all the papers and talked about everywhere. Chopin mentioned her in a letter to his family that summer.

Having had enough, the Iowas were soon packed and on their way home.

Catlin and his family had only just moved to new quarters on the avenue Lord Byron when Clara Catlin took ill with what at first seemed no more than the usual sore throat. But rapidly “her feeble form wasted away,” as Catlin wrote, and on July 28, 1845, Clara died of pneumonia.

In the midst of his grief Catlin arranged for her remains to be shipped home for burial and did all he could to console the children. He and Clara had talked of leaving Paris, and Catlin was inclined now to go as soon as his lease on the Salle Valentino expired. His expenses were high, his
debts increasing. But when a party of Canadian Ojibwas turned up, having heard of the Paris success of the Iowas, and were ready to take their place, Catlin decided to stay.

Still more acclaim followed. Louis-Philippe conferred what to some was the ultimate recognition by having Catlin’s entire collection temporarily installed in a gallery at the Louvre, so that he and his family might enjoy it privately. This would have been a rare honor for any artist, let alone one from America. Moreover, Louis-Philippe asked Catlin to copy fifteen of the works for his gallery at Versailles.

Neither P. T. Barnum nor Tom Thumb, nor Moreau Gottschalk, nor George Catlin, was in any hurry to leave Paris and return home that fall of 1845. Ever the showman, Barnum felt he had been born to play the part of a Paris bon vivant. He relished French cuisine, the theater, the opera, and strolling the boulevards. Barnum would speak later of his extended stay in Paris as the happiest time in his life.

Moreau Gottschalk, who grew increasingly handsome and was always the perfect young gentleman, continued to be embraced by the
monde musical
. He became something of a fashion plate and began performing his own compositions, based on Creole melodies he had heard in childhood. Two in particular, “Bamboula” and “La Savane,” first performed in Paris a few years later, were to make him famous and beloved on both sides of the Atlantic. In one three-year period he would give 1,100 concerts in the United States and Canada. He toured California and Central America. Then, on tour in Brazil in 1869, he suddenly took ill and died at age forty.

George Catlin, still in mourning over the loss of his wife, “retired” to his Paris apartment to concentrate on his work and look after his children, three girls and a boy ranging in age from three to ten. “I thus painted on,” he wrote, “dividing my time between my easel and my little children … resolving and re-resolving to devote the remainder of my life to my art. …”

Catlin’s Indian exhibition, which had been moved from the Louvre to the Galerie des Beaux-Arts on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, closed at
last at the end of June. Catlin kept at his easel, turning out one Indian portrait or scene after another. Before leaving Paris he would produce more than fifty such pictures, largely out of economic necessity. If ever he considered other subjects for a change, a Paris view perhaps, or considered doing a copy at the Louvre, there is no sign of it.

In the summer of 1846, tragedy struck again. All four of Catlin’s children were stricken by typhoid fever. “My occupation was changed to their bedsides, where they were all together writhing in the agonies of the disease.” The three little girls survived, but the youngest, his son, George, did not. Still, Catlin stayed on in Paris nearly a year longer and with no letup in his work.

The ever-persistent Samuel Morse, now known as “the Lightning Man,” was also in Paris once more, having arrived in the fall of 1845, still in quest of a patent from the French. Yet again he faced disappointment. His friend and still ardent supporter Dominique Arago presented him to the Chamber of Deputies, where, after demonstrating his telegraph, Morse was generously acclaimed. But as would be said, he came away loaded with honor and nothing more.

George Healy did not return to Paris until the following year, 1846, and in less than six months he was on his way back to the United States. Expecting to stay longer this time, he took his wife, Louisa, with him. The children, who now included another daughter, Mary, were left in the care of Louisa’s mother. His mission was to gather material for a major painting he was determined to undertake portraying Daniel Webster at the summit of his oratorical powers, delivering his famous reply to Robert Y. Hayne in the Senate in 1830. By the time Healy returned to Paris, his generous client, the king of France, would be gone and prospects quite uncertain.