Nineteenth-century Painters

Nineteenth-century painters were sometimes travelers who ventured beyond frontiers and returned with visual reports of their encounters with other cultures. In an age when engraved drawings were an accepted part of newspaper reportage artists' reports were not likely to be challenged. But painters' accounts were not accompanied by texts and they often took care to insist on the fact of their presence at the scene and among their subjects. This served as a warrant of their reliability and facilitated acceptance of ideas or attitudes implicit in their representations of other cultures. Artists thus presented themselves as surrogates for their audiences--confirming, modifying, reinforcing, and re-shaping perceptions of other cultures. These painters employed different visual strategies as the means of emphasizing their roles as witnesses, and distinctive strategies were often employed depending on the kind of statement the artists were making about the culture they were observing. Three examples of distinctive uses of such visual strategies to insist on the artists' presence can be found in works by George Catlin, Eug�ne Delacroix, and Winslow Homer. In each instance how the artist made his presence felt was related to what the artist had to say about the culture he encountered.

The paintings are: George Catlin's Catlin Painting the Portrait of Mah-To-Toh-Pa--Mandan (1857-69), an example of Catlin's career-long effort to record the appearance of certain Native American

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arsome tribe subdued by their awe at an art that the audience took for granted, as well as reduced by that art to mere representations for the audience's pleasure. The assurance that this was indeed the inevitable relationship between themselves and this exotic culture is the presence of their surrogate, the painter who ventured among the Indians and returned to display their subject nature to his audience. In the works by Homer and Delacroix the painters do not depict themselves in the midst of the scenes but their presence is strongly implied. In Homer's A Visit from the Old Mistress the precise nature of the encounter is somewhat ambiguous. Pohl identifies this work as one in which a conflict is depicted, and she compares it with Homer's similarly composed Prisoners from the Front (1866). As Baigell notes, Homer painted a number of pictures of African Americans based on material gathered during "at least one visit to Virginia, in 1875," and works such as The Cotton Pickers (1876) were typical of his depictions of the people at work (136). Taking The Cotton Pickers with the Visit renders Homer's interest in his subject a little less ambiguous. In the picture of women laboring in the cotton fields and the depiction of a g

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