American Art Collaborative

George Catlin painted Deer’s Hair at a Sac and Fox village in 1835. Catlin later described the portrait in his extensive writings Letters and Notes: “I have made a portrait of the wife of Kee-o-kuk, and of his favourite son, whom he intends to be his successor. These portraits are both painted, also, in the costume tunics precisely in which they were dressed.” Deer’s Hair succeeded his father as chief of the Sac and Fox in 1848. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 56, 1841; reprint 1973; Truettner, The Natural Man Observed, 1979