fferences in how the artists made their presence felt in these works and in what they tried to say, and actually did say, about the cultures they depicted. Catlin placed himself in the midst of the scene, Delacroix designed his scene so that the women in the painting seem to be aware of his presence and offer him an invitation to enter further into their closed world, and Homer presented a scene with an enclosed and staged quality that makes the viewer conscious of a drama being enacted before him.
Catlin was fascinated by Native American culture and was committed to documenting the appearance of the people and their material culture before they were, inevitably in Catlin's view, swept away by the encroaching tide of white settlers. A version of the scene of Catlin painting Mah-To-Toh-Pa had served as a frontispiece for his 1841 book about his time in the West. But in the earlier version, as Pohl points out, Catlin incorrectly, as he knew, featured tipis, which the Mandan did not use. The tipis functioned as part of the design and the simple designs on them were contrasted with the more 'complex' Western art of Catlin's portrait. But even more importantly the tipis were a sign of Catlin's willingness to subordinate particularity of representation (which he claimed was his goal) to the "generalized view of Native Americans . . . which erases their differences and particularities" (Pohl 155). In the painting the inaccurate tipis have been removed and the scene has been expanded to included a much greater crowd of viewers around the Chief and Catlin. As Pohl acutely points out the easel from the engraving has been replaced by a tipi-shaped easel made of branches and Catlin thus "presents himself as literally repainting the surfaces of the 'Indian' tipi, as redefining the significance of the Mandan chief, and of pictorial representation in general, in Mandan culture" (155).
The painting was featured in Catlin's traveling Indi...