About this work
A Plains Indian rider on horseback bears down on a bison at full gallop, bow drawn, the chase reduced to the electric space between hunter and hunted. The composition is horizontal and kinetic — the vast, open prairie stretching to a low horizon, sky consuming the upper half of the image — with the figures locked in a diagonal surge that carries the eye from left to right without pause. This is a scene caught at mid-chase, the outcome still suspended, the land itself a participant. The hand-coloring of the lithograph gives the scene an earthy warmth: tawny grassland, the deep brown mass of the bison, the ochre and rust of the rider's dress — colors that feel dug from the plains rather than applied to them.
*Buffalo Hunt, Chase – No. 6* is a hand-colored lithograph dated 1844, produced by Catlin with engraver John McGahey.
It was published as part of Catlin's *North American Indian Portfolio* in 1844 — a groundbreaking work in its scope, capturing the diversity of Indigenous life through portraits, ceremonial depictions, and scenes of daily activity. The Portfolio appeared after Catlin had spent years touring his Indian Gallery through American cities and across Europe, and it represented his most polished effort to bring that field experience to a wide audience. By the time the Portfolio was issued, Catlin's mission to preserve a record of Plains culture was already becoming urgent: the tribes were beginning to yield to westward expansion and the devastation of European disease.
Because many of Catlin's original paintings were later destroyed by fire or neglect, these lithographs remain the principal medium by which his visual record endures.
Each lithograph is a window into the daily lives and environments of Plains communities at a time of profound cultural and territorial change in North America. On the wall, *Buffalo Hunt, Chase – No. 6* rewards the kind of room that allows it space — a study, a library, or a long hallway where the horizontal sweep of the composition can breathe. It suits natural light, which brings out the warmth of the hand-coloring without flattening the subtle tonal range of the lithographic line. The viewer it speaks to is one drawn to history as action rather than monument: this is the American West not as myth, but as witnessed event, recorded by a man who was there.
