American Art Collaborative

George Catlin described Pure Fountain as a “young and very pretty woman . . . her neck and arms were curiously tattooed, which is a very frequent mode of ornamenting the body amongst this and some other tribes . . . done by pricking into the skin, gunpowder and vermilion.” He painted Pure Fountain at a Ponca village in 1832. (Catlin, Letters and Notes , vol. 1, no. 26, 1841; reprint 1973