‘Samuel Colt: Arms, Art And Invention’

Hartford, Conn.

:The Nineteenth Century was the age of self-invention. Versatile Americans of exceptional ambition and intellect sought their fortunes wherever they could, the country's vast frontier providing fertile opportunity.

The most famous self-invented man of his time was Hartford firearms maker Samuel Colt (1814–1862). As a 16-year-old at sea in 1830, Colt whittled a prototype of the mechanism that would result in his patented revolver. Still casting about two years later, he toured the East Coast giving laughing-gas demonstrations under the stage name "Dr Coult." After a series of spectacular business failures, an occupational hazard for habitual risk-takers, Colt became a global celebrity and an immensely wealthy man.

"Samuel Colt: Arms, Art and Invention," the enterprising exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum through March 4, tells the complicated tale of the intertwining lives of Samuel Colt and another self-invented man, George Catlin (1796–1872), the painter renowned for his sympathetic portraits of Native Americans and stirring visions of the American West.

Colt and Catlin had much in common, says Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, editor of the accompanying catalog Samuel Colt: Arms, Art and Invention and the Wadsworth Atheneum's Krieble curator of American painting and sculpture. Both men, she writes, "were natural showmen and shrewd marketers who were not above stretching the truth to make a point."

Linking the two men forever in history is a series of ten paintings, six of which Colt reproduced as lithographs, that Catlin made for his patron. Late last year, the museum announced that it had purchased four of the paintings, which — painted for promotional purposes — depict the artist in exotic Western or South American settings using Colt firearms. From New Haven, Conn., dealer William Reese the Atheneum acquired a pristine set of the lithographs rendered by John McGahey and printed by Day & Son of London and Chester in 1855. "Samuel Colt" displays these important acquisitions alongside two other paintings from the Colt Firearms Series, loans from the Max and Carolyn Williams Family Trust and the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, N.Y.

Kornhauser's fascination with the Colt-Catlin connection began when, hoping to add a major Catlin to the Atheneum's already outstanding collection of Nineteenth Century American landscape painting, she sought advice from two Catlin scholars, Nancy Anderson at the National Gallery and William Truettner at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, both in Washington, D.C. After putting out the word to dealers in New York City, Kornhauser was soon alerted to the four paintings. After her husband's death, Elizabeth Colt had given the Colt Firearms Series pictures to her sister. The Atheneum's four pictures were still in family hands.