Reviewed by: Framing First Contact: From Catlin to Russell by Kate Elliott Ron Tyler Framing First Contact: From Catlin to Russell. By Kate Elliott. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 200. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) During the nineteenth century, when artists and writers alike were debating and defining what it meant to be an American, artists combined landscape with history painting to offer seemingly direct but ultimately complicated and revealing comments on our national origins. Paintings of the spectacular American landscape reached a high point during these years, fostering belief in a pristine wilderness just waiting to be settled and made productive by European immigrants. In an effort to elaborate on one of the foundational themes of American history, a number of artists chose to depict the moment of “first contact” between Native Americans and Europeans. At the same time, the federal government encouraged these efforts with lucrative contracts for paintings to fill the vacant walls of the new capitol in Washington, D.C. In this context, Kate Elliott, associate professor of art history at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, examines the first contact works of Robert Weir, George Catlin, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Charles M. Russell, reiterating that these images are “about Anglo-American attempts to define itself in contrast to the Other, not attempts to understand the Other” (15). Weir, who spent decades teaching landscape and topographical drawing at West Point, has one painting, Embarkation of the Pilgrims from Delft Haven, Holland, 22 July 1620 (1836–1843), in the U.S. Capitol rotunda and might have had another if a congressional committee had selected his depiction of Henry Hudson’s 1609 landing. Elliott describes Weir’s vacillation over Hudson’s first contact with the Lenape (Delaware) Indians, initially painting a scene of welcome and goodwill in 1835, but three years later, as thousands of Cherokee Indians were on the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory, he rendered it as a fraught and anxious encounter. The theme of a pristine wilderness at first contact persisted in Catlin’s La Salle series (now in the National Gallery of Art) as well as in the great landscapes of Bierstadt and Moran. Catlin painted a series of twenty-eight small pictures of La Salle’s explorations “in the wild days of the west,” focusing much more on the landscape than on La Salle (43). They were intended for the museum of French history that King Louis Philippe was [End Page 195] creating at Versailles, but they never reached him because a revolution had driven the monarch from the country. That might have saved Catlin the embarrassment of being rejected; surely the small, hastily done works would never have hung in the same gallery with the great history paintings by French artists like Horace Vernet. (In fact, when the La Salle series was on exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth in 1970, a visitor asked me if the paintings were reproductions.) Elliott highlights Bierstadt and Moran’s famous scenes of untainted wilderness, which they elaborated upon to create first contact moments. Bierstadt was successful with his Discovery of the Hudson River (1874) and Settlement of California, Bay of Monterey, 1770 (1876), while Moran failed with his Ponce de Leon in Florida, 1513 (1878). Elliott suggests that the bitterness of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the rancor of sectional division were still too fresh to allow a painting of a southern scene to be placed in the capitol. Charles M. Russell brought a different perspective to first contact with his Lewis and Clark Meeting Indians at Ross’ Hole (1912) for the Montana state capitol. Despite the title, he pictured the event from the Indians’ point of view, with Lewis and Clark occupying only a small space on the right side of the nearly twelve-by-twenty-five-feet picture. This handsomely designed and illustrated volume is another fine production of the Charles M. Russell Center at the University of Oklahoma. Ron Tyler Amon Carter Museum of American Art (Retired) Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association