About this work
The scene is immediately, viscerally legible: a mounted hunter and a bull buffalo have reversed roles entirely. As Catlin himself described it, the bull "often turns upon its assailant, and runs him back, over the whole ground; in which unpleasant reverse he has but to balance himself upon his little horse, praying for smooth ground under its feet, and deliverance from the fury that is behind him." Horse and rider flee at full gallop across an open plain, the enormous bull thundering just behind them — muscle, dust, and speed compressed into a wide horizontal frame. The image was produced as a three-stone tinted lithograph, finished with hand-coloring — warm ochres and earth tones for the landscape, the deep umber of the buffalo's bulk thrown into relief against an expansive, pale sky. It offers an image of a powerful, unpredictable, and untamed animal — not unlike the popular image of a wild, unpredictable, and untamed West itself.
The man depicted is thought to have been Sir Charles A. Murray, who traveled the region between 1834 and 1836.
This is Plate No. 12 of Catlin's *North American Indian Portfolio: Hunting Scenes and Amusements of the Rocky Mountains and Prairies of America*, 1844.
It was among the most well-known of Catlin's buffalo paintings — one of 13 buffalo scenes included among the 25 prints in the portfolio, first published in 1844 in England and directed mainly at well-to-do British audiences.
The portfolio was the culmination of Catlin's years of travel, during which he immersed himself in the lives and customs of nearly 50 Native American tribes between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.
Because most of Catlin's paintings and collections were destroyed by fire or neglect, his lithographs remain the principal medium by which his message was conveyed, and they have come to hold even greater significance today than when they were first published.
Although Catlin often depicted the buffalo in dramatic hunt scenes, he was deeply concerned about the reckless and wasteful killing of the buffalo, and in *Letters and Notes*, first published in 1841, he openly criticized the mass killing precipitated by fur companies.
This is a print for rooms that can hold a charged silence — a study, a library, a wide-open living space with natural light and warm wood tones. Catlin's lithographs ranged from portraits to depictions of tribal ceremonies, from the anecdotal to the idealized; he appealed to his readers with the thrill of the hunt and conveyed his respect for his subjects master
