The natural man observed

Indians and their lifeways have provided one of the most popular themes in American art since the discovery of the New World. Sixteenth and seventeenth century artists who accompanied exploring expeditions to the East and West coasts sought to create pictures which would satisfy the curiosity of stay-at-home Europeans about the appearances and customs of the Indians they encountered. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century another motive began to encourage artists to picture Indians - a growing fear that those tribes who still lived beyond the rapidly advancing frontier of white settlement would be destroyed by white men?s diseases, wars, and liquor, or that their traditional picturesque customs would be immutably altered through contracts with civilization before artists could compile visual records of those Indians? great leaders and of their strange customs. No artists felt that urgency more strongly than did George Catlin.