Nineteenth-century painters
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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, EugFne 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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thers stand out like exclamation marks and are, obligingly, inverted on the heads of those seated on the ground, adding to the emphatic directing of attention toward Catlin. But in the group to the right of Catlin the feathers are either not visible or are shown horizontally, providing a visual accent emphasizing the forward movement of Catlin's right knee and arm.
Thus an audience in the East would see the fearsome 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 p
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North Africa, Americans Catlin, Native Americans, Women Algiers, African Americans, African American, Prisoners Front, , Civil War, Native American, native americans, sexual invitation, history stephen eisenman, al london thames, art critical, history stephen, critical history, woman left, hudson 1994, et al, et al london, eisenman et al, al london, london thames hudson, eisenman et,
Approximate Word count = 3179
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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