American Art Collaborative

“I have visited forty-eight different tribes, the greater part of which I found speaking different languages, and containing in all 400,000 souls. I have brought home safe, and in good order, 310 portraits in oil, all painted in their native dress, and in their own wigwams . . . as well as a very extensive and curious collection of their costumes, and all their other manufactures, from the size of a wigwam down to the size of a quill or a rattle.” George Catlin probably painted Brave Chief, an Omaha, at Fort Leavenworth (in today’s Kansas) in 1832. Brave Chief later sat to artist Charles Bird King (1785-1862) in Washington. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 1, no. 1, 1841, reprint 1973; Truettner, The Natural Man Observed, 1979)