George Catlin (1796–1872). Buffalo Dance. Folio plate no. 8 from Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio. Hunting Scenes and Amusements of the Rocky Mountains and Prairies of America. (London: ca. 1875). Lithograph with original hand color. Folio lithograph from the rare hand-colored issue, published in London circa 1875 by Chatto & Windus. Plate trimmed and mounted on card with manuscript ruled line around image. Image: 11 3/4 x 17 ½ in. Light scattered foxing outside of image along lower edge. Very fine condition.
$6,500.00
During the 1830s, Catlin lived for years among several North American Indian tribes, studying their ways. His published works provide us with the most authentic anthropological record of these already vanishing people.
“A young lawyer turned portraitist, George Catlin traveled west from his home in Pennsylvania in 1830 to fulfill his dream of recording on canvas the North American Indians and their way of life. It was his desire, he said, to paint “faithful portraits of their principal personages, both men and women, from each tribe, views of their villages games, etc., and [to keep] full notes on their character and history. I designed, also, to procure their costumes, and a complete collection of their manufactures and weapons, and to perpetuate them in a Gallery Unique, for the instruction of the ages.” (Wagner)
The lithographs represent the greatest images from Catlin’s travels. George Catlin’s Portfolio marks a noteworthy moment in American history. Catlin traveled extensively chronicling the lives and culture of Indians across America. He created nearly 500 paintings of which some were used to make prints for this momentous work.
Catlin devoted a section of the Indian Gallery to dances. Here Mandan buffalo dancers, taking turns as hunter and prey, repeatedly mimed the hunt. Catlin noted that the dance never failed, because “by this taking of places, the scene is easily kept up night and day, until the desired effect has been produced, that of making buffalo come.”
The record Catlin created is unique, both in the breadth of information and in the depth of the sympathetic understanding that his images demonstrate. Catlin described the American Indian as “an honest, hospitable, faithful, brave, warlike, cruel, revengeful, relentless—yet honourable, contemplative, and religious being.” He saw no future for either the Indian way of life or his very existence, and with these thoughts always at the back of his mind, he worked against time, setting himself a truly punishing schedule, to record what he saw. Catlin’s study remains one of the most widely circulated works on American Indians written in the nineteenth century, and the illustrations are valued for their highly important visual documentation of indigenous Indian life in the American West.
Refs.: Howes C-243; McCracken, no. 10; Sabin no. 11532; Wagner-Camp-Becker, no. 105a-1; Reese, no. 25
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