Wadsworth Acquires Four Catlin Paintings

HARTFORD — Four paintings by George Catlin from a series of ten commissioned by Samuel Colt, and a related set of six lithographs and two wood engravings have been acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

George Catlin and Samuel Colt had much in common as entrepreneurial showmen who gained international acclaim in their respective fields by the mid-19th century. During their 25-year friendship, ended only by Colt’s premature death, the firearms manufacturer came to the aid of the artist-explorer when he direly needed financing of a trip to South America.

In Catlin’s extensive writings he vouches for the professional necessity to bear Colt’s firearms, relating that his faithful gun, “Sam Colt,” was “made expressly for me by my old friend Colonel Colt, and which has answered to the nick-name ‘Sam’ in my former travels.”

He later writes: “Why Sam Colt, a six-shot little rifle, always lying before me during the day and in my arms during the night, by which a tiger’s or alligator’s eye, at a hundred yards, was sure to drop a red tear.”

The Colt Firearms Series was commissioned in the mid-1850s, and features the artist as an adventurer and expert marksman using Colt’s innovative revolving firearms.

The titles of the paintings acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum echo the dramatic narrative each contains: “Catlin the Artist and Sportsman Relieving One of His Companions from an Unpleasant Predicament During His Travels in Brazil,” 1854; “A Mid-Day Halt on the Rio Trombutas,” 1854; “Water Hunting for Deer, a Night Scene on the Susquehanna,” circa 1854-55; and “Catlin the Artist Shooting Buffalos with Colt’s Pistol,” 1855.

Scholars have debated the number of paintings in the series, with nine to twelve being reported. Colt’s probate inventory, taken soon after his death in 1862, lists ten. Colt’s widow, Elizabeth, gave the ten paintings to her sister, Hetty Hart Jarvis Beach, who bequeathed them to her daughter, Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Robinson, and so descended in the family until the series was dispersed in the mid-20th Century.

Sets of six lithographs made after Catlin’s paintings of 1854-55 were produced for Colt by the English lithographer John McGahey and printed by Day & Son of London and Chester in 1855. The set purchased by the Wadsworth descended in the Colt family; others are in the collections of the Connecticut State Library, Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, and the Amon Carter Museum. It is not known how many were printed.

The two wood engravings, which appeared in tandem in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 16, 1857, are a gift of H. Britt Brown.

“Catlin’s Colt Firearms Series, and the lithographs and wood engravings made from them, represent an unusual alliance of art and commerce. I cannot think of another renowned artist in mid-19th Century America providing such a product endorsement,” said Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, the Krieble curator of American painting and sculpture at Wadsworth Atheneum.

According to Willard Holmes, director of Wadsworth Atheneum: “One hundred years ago, Samuel Colt’s widow, Elizabeth, bequeathed to the museum a number of remarkable gifts, among them the Colt Firearms Collections. No question that the Atheneum is the perfect home for this rare and superb grouping of works by George Catlin.”

The Catlin acquisitions plus loans of two paintings from the series will be exhibited beginning in May 2006 as part of “Samuel Colt: Arms, Art and Invention.”

All ten of Catlin’s Colt Firearms paintings are reproduced and discussed in a book accompanying the exhibition, which will be published in May by Yale University Press in association with Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.