- Type: Art Audio File
- Collection: American Art
- Culture/Region: America
- Subject Area: Visual Arts
- Grade Level: K-12, College, Adult, Families
For Families
Can you spot Catlin hiding in the corner of the painting? Listen to the artist’s description of seeing flamingos in person, and imagine if you could stand perfectly still while these birds investigated you:
We kept on, and at length came within some five or six rods of the nearest nests, where the females were sitting on their eggs, and the husbands standing on one leg by them and fast asleep, whilst others were gathering worms from the mud and bringing to feed them!
The silly things looked hard at us as an unaccountable appearance, but the bunch of bushes not apparently moving, they seemed to think it was but the natural. I had no chance to sketch, as “Sam” [the nickname of Catlin’s Samuel Colt long gun] was before me in both hands, and motions would have been imprudent; but I had the most perfect chance to see and to study (to sketch in my mind) every attitude and every characteristic.
At length one of the tallest of the throng, with his mouth full of collected worms, seeming to be suspicious, advanced quite up to take a good look at us, and poked his long neck forward, and began to walk around to get a side or back view of us. His motions and expressions were so droll, as I saw him across the bridge of my nose, that I burst (which I could not avoid) into a loud laugh.
For Everyone
In this excerpt from his 1868 Last Rambles Amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes, George Catlin (1796–1872) recounts coming upon a colony of flamingos on a hunting trip in South America:
We kept on, and at length came within some five or six rods of the nearest nests, where the females were sitting on their eggs, and the husbands standing on one leg by them and fast asleep, whilst others were gathering worms from the mud and bringing to feed them!
The silly things looked hard at us as an unaccountable appearance, but the bunch of bushes not apparently moving, they seemed to think it was but the natural. I had no chance to sketch, as “Sam” [the nickname of Catlin’s Samuel Colt long gun] was before me in both hands, and motions would have been imprudent; but I had the most perfect chance to see and to study (to sketch in my mind) every attitude and every characteristic.
At length one of the tallest of the throng, with his mouth full of collected worms, seeming to be suspicious, advanced quite up to take a good look at us, and poked his long neck forward, and began to walk around to get a side or back view of us. His motions and expressions were so droll, as I saw him across the bridge of my nose, that I burst (which I could not avoid) into a loud laugh. He screamed, and I fired through the group, a raking fire, and another cylinder as they were getting on the wing; and of all the curious hunting or other scenes that I have seen on earth, that scene was the most curious. Those that were wheeling about in the air, like a cloud above us, and shadowing the earth around us; and as the alarm was general, those rising more slowly in the extreme distance looked like a white fog streaming up from the ground. We stood still, and the whirling multitudes in the air formed into lines like infantry, and each, with its leader, was moving around and over our heads, not knowing what the matter was, or where the danger was, or where to go.