‘Rising from the stain on the painter’s palette’: George Catlin’s Picturesque and the Legibility of Seminole Removal

Abstract

Analyzes Catlin’s picturesque aesthetic as a means of rationalizing Seminole removal from Florida. Notes that Catlin’s two-volume Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians (1841) is based on travels done at the same time federal troops and local militia enforced the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Hence it is not by chance that the two volumes are prefaced by maps, one before and one after the removals of native Americans to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. Claims Catlin’s sympathetic renderings of Osceola and other Seminoles are most instructive in demonstrating both the imperial frame of national American exceptionalism as well as the picturesque balance of interdependent regionalisms on which the imagining of national Union relied in the years before the Civil War.