George Catlin, The Author Painting a Chief in an Indian Village, frontispiece in Catlin, Letters and Notes.... vol. 1 (London, 1841)

George Catlin is primarily noted for his "re-presentations" of native Americans. In this frontispiece he uses the Eurocentric ideology of re-presentation to assert the authority of his images and account. The assumption that Catlin's image depends upon, is that Western modes of re-presentation are more "real' than those of other cultures, in this case Native American. He makes this point by comparing his "mastery" of Western conventions of perspective and knowledge of anatomy to the "primitivism" of the art of the Native Americans manifested by the figures decorating the tent in the background. It is not by chance that he presents himself painting an oil painting. Compare this to the social, cultural, and economic implications of oil painting articulated in John Berger's account of the media. Note how the Native Americans that recline on the ground by the feet of the erect Catlin strike reminiscent of Greek Classical sculpture.

The astonishment of the Native Americans in beholding Catlin's painting is reminiscent of the nineteenth century British critic John Ruskin's account of the "inability" non-western obervers to read western images. Rather than using this phenomenon to question the universality of Western modes of picture making, Ruskin uses this as evidence that "the truth of nature is not to discerned by the uneducated senses":

The Chinese, children in all things, suppose a good perspective drawing to be as false as we feel their plate patterns to be, or wonder at the strange buildings which come to a point at the end. And all the early works, whether of nations or of men, show, by their want of shade, how little the eye, without knowledge, is to be depended upon to discover truth. The eye of a Red Indian, keen enough to find the trace of his enemy or his prey, even in the unnatural turn of a trodden leaf, is yet so blunt to the impressions of shade, that Mr. Catlin mentions his once having been in great danger from having painted a portrait with the face in half light, which the untutored observers imagined and affirmed to be the painting of half a face."

Note how Ruskin assumes in his use of words like "knowledge" and "truth" that Western education, culture, art, etc. is more directly tied to "objective truth" or to the "real."

Compare Catlin's representation to the codes articulated by Hal Foster in his discussion of the ideology of Primitivism.