American Art Collaborative

George Catlin described these members of the Osage tribe as “uniformly dressed in skins of their own dressing---strictly maintaining their primitive looks and manners, without the slightest appearance of innovations, excepting in the blankets, which have been recently admitted to their use instead of the buffalo robes . . .” Catlin painted this group portrait at Fort Gibson (in present-day Oklahoma) in 1834. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 38, 1841; reprint 1973