About this work
The canvas pulls you in immediately through sheer momentum. Riders on horseback chase a herd of buffalo across green rolling hills, and the eye moves with them — tracking the diagonal surge of bodies, hooves, and weapons across the open plain. The depiction of man versus beast stands out against the backdrop of the bright green grass of the rolling hills on the prairies, the palette at once vivid and honest, without the theatrical storm-lit drama of Romantic contemporaries. Catlin himself wrote of representing "a party of Indians in chase of a herd, some of whom are pursuing with lance and others with bows," and that division of weapons gives the composition a layered, almost cinematic depth — figures at different distances, in different postures of pursuit, collapsing the vastness of the Great Plains into a single charged moment.
Catlin painted *Buffalo Chase with Bows and Lances* in 1832–1833, in oil on canvas.
He claimed to have created the painting from a sketch made while watching this exact scene on the Upper Missouri of the Great Plains in 1832, during the peak years of his frontier travels. Among the earliest artists of European descent to travel beyond the Mississippi, Catlin journeyed west in the 1830s driven largely by the fear that American Indians, the great buffalo herds, and a way of life would one day vanish. That urgency is embedded in the paint itself. Because of its apparent genuineness, the painting is utilized today to help document Indigenous peoples' lifeways in the nineteenth century.
As curator Adam Duncan Harris has noted, "Catlin's paintings illuminate in great detail the close ties between Native American tribes and bison in the 1830s." The work now resides in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, part of the collection acquired from the Harrison estate.
This is a painting that demands horizontal space and natural light — a wide wall where the lateral energy of the chase has room to breathe. It suits interiors that lean into American history, the natural world, or the muscular tradition of 19th-century documentary art: a study lined with books, a great-room with exposed timber, a hallway broad enough to stop in. The viewer it speaks to is someone drawn not to decoration but to witness — to the feeling of standing at the edge of a vanished world and seeing it whole, if only for a moment. It is an image that engages the imagination of the unique relationship between Indigenous peoples and bison — and nearly two centuries on, it has lost none of its power.
