Robert Henri and George Catlin - Essay Example

Robert Henri Robert Henri was born in the year 1865 and he grew up in Cozad, Nebraska, a town that had founded. His father was a businessperson as well as a professional riverboat gambler. In the year 1881, his family moved to Denver and one year later, his father was charged of manslaughter making them change their names and escape to Atlantic City, New Jersey in order to avoid arrest (Adams, para1). Henri developed a passion for painting and enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in the year 1886 where James B. Kelly, Thomas Anshutz and Thomas Hovenden taught him. In the year 1888, he moved to Paris where he enrolled at the Academie Julian under Tony Robert-Fleury and Adolphe-William Bouguereau. During summers, he could paint in Barbizon and Brittany, and visited Italy before gaining admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the year1891. Late that year, he went back to Philadelphia and in the year 1892, he went on with his studies in the academy. Moreover, he started his lengthy and great career as a teacher of art at the School of Design for Women and he taught here until the year 1895. While here, he came across the youthful newspaper illustrators who would later become famous affiliates of ‘The Eight’: Everett Shinn William Glackens, John Sloan and George Luks. Henri regularly visited Paris where Frans Hals, Diego Velazquez and Edouard Manet were his greatest source of inspiration. In the year 1899, one of his paintings was bought for the Musee National du Luxembourg. This was one year after having married Linda Craige (Margaret and Horowitz Raymond, para1). According to Adams, Henri’s painting portraits were often of different ethnic types such as Chinese, Native American, African-American, and Irish. He also painted many pictures of dancers and when describing the principles of vital art, he often pointed to Isadora Duncan. In the year 1900, Henri decided to settle in New York and he got a teaching job at the New York School of Art where he worked from 1902-1908. Slowly, he started rejecting the academic painting as well as impressionism’s discreet traditions, turning his focus on urban realist themes produced in a bold, painterly style. In the year 1906, Henri was nominated to the National Academy of Design, and during that summer, he tutored in Spain. Following the academy’s refusal to exhibit works by Henri's circle during its annual show in 1907; he decided to arrange an independent show and in February 1908, he held the famous exhibition of ‘The Eight’ at the Macbeth Gallery. In the same year, he married Marjorie Organ the illustrator, as his second wife. In the year1910, he prepared the first ‘Exhibition of Independent Artists’ and in 1913 played a peripheral role in the organization of the Armory Show by the Association of American Sculptors and Painters. Between the year 1911 and 1919, Henri also organized jury-free exhibitions at the MacDowell Club. Despite the fact that he kept on winning many awards, the influence that Henri had as a progressive creative leader started diminishing following the rise of American and European modernism and he came to be recognized only as part of the artistic enterprise. Nevertheless, his work during his visits to Southwest presented some of the most inventive and innovative of his career. The beginning of one of Henri’s most innovative eras began in the summer of 1914 when he took a trip to La Jolla, California (Margaret & Horowitz, para2, and Leeds, para9). Margaret & Horowitz explain that he lectured at the Art Students League from the year 1915 to 1927. Although personal expression underlines all the creative endeavors of Robert Henri, his portraiture, the painting mode for which he is infamous, explicitly manifest it. Henri’s work went by Thomas Eakins’ realist tradition, an artist for whom he had the utmost admiration. He believed that Eakins was America’s greatest painter of portrait. Henri’s paintings were principally single-figure masterpieces that directly confront the observer. However, his work portrays a wide array of diversity in terms of stylistic influences as well as subjects. Nonetheless, his artwork neither adopted the modernist vision nor went past representation parameters. Henri took his work directly from life – he neither took interest in any movement or school, nor cared for art as art. His major point of focus was in life (Leeds, para2). Henri’s most personal themes included portraits of dancers, children, family members, as well as works executed in Ireland, Spain, and other parts of America, which point to his lifelong investigative painting style that embody the range as well as diversity of his work. His art was marked by audacious experimentation with various styles and it mainly lies under distinct sequential episodes that are somewhat, shaped by his travels. Every year, he shunned the exhibition and teaching responsibilities that eclipsed his painting endeavors with long summer vacations, which gave him new artistic insight every season. Due to his humanistic and democratic viewpoints, his attraction towards portraying different kinds of individuals became a mission that took him to different places ranging from California, New Mexico, Ogunquit and Monhegan Island, San Diego and La Jolla, Maine, Ireland and Spain, Taos and Santa Fe, among others (Leeds, para3). Even though Henri was a significant figure painter and portraitist, he is best recalled as an influential and a progressive teacher. Margery Ryerson, Henri’s former pupil, collected his ideas on art and published them as The Art Spirit in the year 1923 in Philadelphia. He passed away on in the year 1929 at the age of 64 (Margaret and Horowitz Raymond, para3). Conclusion Apparently, Henri made significant contributions as a painter, teacher, and writer. His eloquence as a credible communicator reverberates throughout his teachings and written words, but is predominantly expressed in his art. The broad influence as a teacher he made use of together with his endeavors as an artists’ advocate have, nevertheless, obscured his involvement in painting. George Catlin George Catlin was an American painter, traveler and author whose area of specialization was on Old West Native Americans’ portraits. He was born in July 26, 1796 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. During the Wyoming Valley Massacre, an Indian uprising in Pennsylvania that had happened twenty years before his birth, his mother and grandmother had been held captive and as a child, Catlin would have listened to many Indians stories. He is therefore most famous as an artist who was intrigued with Indians and who portrayed their life in detail in his writings and paintings. The best part of his childhood entailed roving in the woods in search for Indian artifacts (McNamara, para4). Georgecatlin.org explains that Catlin’s passion of painting the American Indians developed after he saw a delegation of Plains Indians in Philadelphia, and that made him to resolve to make a lifetime commitment of recording Native Americans’ lives as well as customs. In Philadelphia Catlin loved visiting the museum that Charles Wilson Peale administered since it had various Indian items as well as to Clark and Lewis’ expedition. He painted a delegation of western Indians who toured Philadelphia, in addition to deciding to learn everything he could about their history. Towards the end of 1820s, one of his paintings included the portrait of New York governor by the name DeWitt Clinton. The governor at one point gave Catlin a commission to make lithographs of episodes from the newly launched Erie Canal, for a celebratory booklet (McNamara, para6 &7). It is important to note that Catlin initially schooled to become a lawyer, which he practiced briefly in Wilkes Barre. However, he soon turned out to being a professional artist who traveled widely all over North America in the 1830s in order to document them on canvas. Americanart.si.edu records that in the 1830s, Catlin travelled West five times with the intention of painting the Indians who lived in the Plains together with their lifestyle. He felt the conviction that for Native Americans, westward extension fueled certain kinds of disaster and according to him, his Indian Gallery as a way would act as a way of rescuing the Native Americans’ primitive customs and looks from oblivion. In 1837, Catlin opened an Indian Gallery in New York City, which gave people who lived in the eastern city an early opportunity of appreciating the lives of the Indians who were still residing in the western frontier (McNamara, para2). In the year 1839, he sailed to London where he took 8 tons of Indian artifacts and hundreds of paintings. The next year, his family joined him there (National Gallery of Art, 1). In the year 1841, Catlin published two volumes of the book Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, which had over 800 pages and in it were hundreds of material that he had collected during his trips among the Indians (McNamara, para17). He later visited South America (in the 1850s) where he painted numerous Indians and kept a comprehensive record of all his trips. He employed a number of Ojibbeway Indians and Iowa groups to perform ritual ceremonies and dances over and above exhibiting artifacts and paintings. His lively lectures as well as the real assortment of artifacts made his shows exceptionally popular. In London, Queen Victoria attended while in France, Catlin really amazed King Louis Philippe that he resolved to hire him to make paintings regarding La Salle’s 16th century adventures. La Salle was a French adventurer who toured North America. In the same period, Catlin painted numerous personal portraits of Indians as well (National Gallery of Art, 1). Towards the end 1830s and 1840s, Catlin had started exhibiting the Indian Gallery both in Europe as well as in eastern capitals, over and above advocating for the lifestyle of the Indians. However, he encountered the challenge of surviving and maintaining his collection together, and these directed him to dubious strategies. Throughout his career, he tried to lobby the government of the United States for support with the hope that hoping the Congress would buy the Indian Gallery and make it future generations’ bequest. However, this did not happen and the disillusioned Catlin became bankrupt in the year 1852. An industrialist from Philadelphia paid the artist’s debt s, took possession of his Indian Gallery and later donated the paintings to the Smithsonian (soon following the death of the artist). Catlin's Indian Gallery today bears the recognition of an eminent cultural treasure and to date; it is a source of rare insight for native cultures over and above being a significant chapter in American history (Americanart.si.edu, para5). Apparently, Catlin was the first artist who recorded the Plains Indians in their own regions. He had an admiration for them as he considered them to be an embodiment of the ‘natural man’s’ Enlightenment ideal living in agreement with nature. Nevertheless, in a frontier area going through dramatic transformation, the over five-hundred works of art in the Indian Gallery also disclose the momentous encounter of two diverse cultures (Americanart.si.edu, para2). Conclusion George Catlin was indeed one of the best painters in America, celebrated for his Native Americans’ iconic portraits. He committed himself towards writing about and meeting the Native Americans in a period when territorial expansion culminated in the near elimination of many aboriginal cultures. Through his Indian artifacts, paintings as well as gallery, he travelled around Europe as well as the US where he not only stirred up controversy, but also created a sensation. Works Cited Adams, Henry. Robert Henri 1865-1929. 2006. Web. Americanart.si.edu. Catlin Virtual Exhibition. 2009. Web. Georgecatlin.org. George Catlin Biography. N.d. Web. Leeds, Valerie A. Robert Henri: American Icon. 1998. Web. Margaret and Horowitz Raymond. American Impressionism and Realism. 2102. Web. McNamara, Robert. George Catlin Painted American Indians in the Early 1800s. 2012. Web. National Gallery of Art. George Catlin. 2012. Web. Read More