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 painted this woman’s portrait at Fort Union, at the western border of present-day North Dakota, in 1832. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 1, no. 1, 1841; reprint 1973)