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It’s no surprise that after leaving the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, Connecticut, the exhibit “Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention” will travel to museums in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and eastern Washington. Colt, who made his fortune manufacturing pistols in Hartford, is a natural subject of interest in the West, where his rugged revolver was once known as the Peacemaker. In the Northeast, however, an exhibit about firearms is a much tougher sell; you might just as well set up a NASCAR souvenir stand in Harvard Square. Yet there was a lot more to Colt than guns. As Jack Kelly wrote in our Fall 2004 issue, he was instrumental in showing the world how to produce goods in large quantities using interchangeable parts.

The exhibit, which is scheduled to open at the Wadsworth Atheneum on September 20 and remain until March 2007, contains arms of all sorts, including counterfeits and infringements of Colt’s patents, as well as documents, paintings, photographs, busts, medallions, and ceremonial gifts. Among them is a flintlock fowling piece, probably built in the 1640s by a French or Flemish gunsmith, that has a revolving breech mechanism strikingly similar to that found in Colt’s revolver of two centuries later. Colt saw the musket on a visit to the Tower of London in 1851 and acquired it for his own collection.

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Of particular interest is a set of 1850s paintings made by George Catlin, the famed chronicler in art and words of American Indian life and customs. Samuel Colt was a fan of his art, and after Catlin suffered a financial reverse in 1852, Colt (who was no stranger to financial reverses himself) commissioned a set of promotional paintings. Catlin revisited his old Western haunts and took a trip to South America, turning out along the way a series of 10 paintings showing Amazon scenes and American buffalo and deer hunts, always including in the image a Colt firearm being discharged.

A catalogue of the exhibit, written by Herbert G. Houze, is available from Yale University Press (260 pages, $65). Besides sumptuous photographs of the entire exhibit and many related items, it provides a detailed biography of Samuel Colt along with well-informed discussions of his technology and the world he lived in. For more information on the exhibit and its future itinerary, see www.wadsworthatheneum.org .