University of Virginia Library

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36

☞ The above is a hasty enumeration of the paintings
and other articles in the Gallery, and the visitors will certainly
be willing to make due allowance for the unfinished
condition in which many of the paintings are exhibited—the
author of these works has travelled, for seven years past, under
peculiar privations and difficulties in procuring these
sketches ; and his canvass has been carried the whole way
with him, and the greater part of the paintings stand exactly
in the same state as they were made in the villages of the
different tribes.

He, therefore, puts them up rather as fac similes of what
he has seen, than as finished works of art, which require
more time and more favorable circumstances to produce.
He promises, however, to place them, in turn, upon his casel,
and render them eventually more pleasing to the eye—
and also, to give a more minute and complete description of them, and Indian manners and customs in general, in a work of two quarto volumes, which he will be ready to put
forth to the world in a few weeks, entitled—"Catlin's Letters
and Notes on the Manners and Customs of the North
American Indians."

☞ The Certificates which are attached to the Portraits
Landscapes, &c., in the fore part of the Catalogue, are the voluntary
approbations of gentlemen who have spent the greater
part of their lives amongst those tribes, and know the most of
them familiarly.

In addition to these Certificates, nearly every portrait has inseparably
attached to its back, an individual Cortificate, signed by Indian Agents, Officers of the Army, or other persons who
were present when the picture was painted. The form of these
Certificates is as follows:—

No. 207. Blackfoot.

pe-toh-pe-kiss,

The Eagle Ribs.

I hereby certify that this Portrait was painted
from the life, at Fort Union, mouth of Yellow
Stone — in the year 1832, by Geo. Catlin,
and that the Indian sat in the costume in which
it is painted.

John F. A. Sanford,
U. S. Indian Agent.