Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/418

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

pencil sketches of judges, juries, and culprits, I very deliberatelyresolved to convert my law library into paint pots and brushes, and to pursue painting as my future and apparently more agreeable profession." He settled in Philadelphia in 1823, and was at once admitted to the fraternity of artists there, which included Thomas Sully, John Nagle, Charles Wilson, and Rembrandt Peale. In the next year he was admitted as an academician of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was most successful as a miniature painter in water-colors on ivory. Among his more famous paintings were one of Mrs. Madison in a turban; the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1839; the portrait of De Witt Clinton, which hangs in the Governor's Room of the New York City Hall, and of which the Franklin Institute, of Rochester, has a copy from his hand; and portraits of members of the Legislature and other prominent men of New York. He visited New York, Buffalo, Norfolk, and other cities in the exercise of his art; and often saw the delegations of Indians that were in the habit of visiting Washington at that period of our history. While in Philadelphia, he writes, his mind was continually reaching for some branch or enterprise of the art "on which to devote a whole lifetime of enthusiasm, . . . a delegation of some ten or fifteen noble and dignified looking Indians from the wilds of the far West suddenly arrived in the city, arrayed and equipped in all of their classic beauty, with shield and helmet, with tunic and manteau, tinted and tasseled off exactly for the painter's palette." Having an eye for nature rather than for the conventionalities of civilization, he had long been of the opinion that the wilderness of our country afforded models equal to those from which the Grecian sculptors transferred inimitable grace and beauty to marble; and a short experience in the woods among Indians confirmed him in this view. In the midst of his success as a painter, he wrote in 1861, "I again resolved to use my art, and so much of the labors of my future life as might be required, in rescuing from oblivion the looks and customs of the vanishing races of native man in America, to which I plainly saw they were hastening before the approach and certain progress of civilization." If he should live to accomplish his design, he thought, "the result of my labors will doubtless be interesting to future eyes, who will have little else left from which to judge of the original inhabitants of this simple race of beings." So he set out alone, unaided, and unadvised, to collect his portraits and illustrations of primitive looks and customs, to set them up "in a gallery, unique and imperishable, for the use and benefit of future ages." He was never even comfortably off in money matters, says his biographer, Mrs. Clara Catlin Clarke, "relying for his livelihood upon his brush or his pen. He lived poor and died the same. He re-