Catlin gathered some 500 portraits as well as artefacts into his "Indian Gallery" and toured the eastern states with it before displaying it in London, Paris and Brussels where he was met with enthusiasm and granted an audience with King Louis-Philippe. His eventual fate, however, was almost as ignominious as that of his sitters. Public curiosity waned and he spent the best part of three decades in an increasingly desperate and fruitless search for funds (at one point he was jailed for debt) before returning to America in poverty.
Catlin had painted the Native Americans as if "snatching from a hasty oblivion" and what this exhibition demonstrates is not simply a parade of strikingly individual faces but an important element in the formation of an equally distinctive American national art. Catlin stands as a direct equivalent of the Hudson River School painters who turned from European models to the bigger vistas offered by the landscapes of their own country. If Thomas Cole and Frederic Church captured America's waterfalls and wildernesses then Catlin did the same with its original inhabitants.
A small slice of Italy's national image will be on display at the always rewarding Estorick Collection in north London. Giorgio Casali was the photographer who, through his work for the style and design magazine Domus, chronicled the outbreak of creative talent that marked the postwar years. The lamps designed by the Castiglioni brothers and the furniture of Gio Ponti and Ettore Sottsass remain staples for consumers with an overactive interior design gland but part of their initial impact — a push along the road to classic status — was given by Casali's spare and elegant photographs. In an understated way he made it clear that these objects were representations of lifestyle and aspiration rather than utility — la dolce vita in fact.
There was also a moral element to both Casali's work and that of the designers themselves. Their version of modernity was a refutation of Mussolini's futuristic aesthetic since it was based on the consumer rather than the state — a reclamation of style. What his photographs capture is not just an Italy growing increasingly at ease with itself but one gaining the confidence to project itself as a brand.
