About this work
The eye enters this wide, horizontal scene at full gallop. *Buffalo Hunt, Chase No. 5* depicts a moment from a buffalo hunt on horseback — riders and bison locked in furious motion across an open prairie, the land rolling out to a spare horizon. The work is a toned lithograph with applied watercolor , its warm earth palette punctuated by the dark mass of bison and the bright flash of horses. The composition is bracingly horizontal, built for the breathless momentum of the chase itself. Catlin described this plate as representing "a number of the accidents of the chase" and noted the variety of the rolling prairie and the effect of the Indian's deadly weapons forcibly displayed. The bow and arrow command particular attention: Catlin wrote from experience that "the bow is a far more efficient weapon than the best firearm that could be produced," a conviction earned firsthand on the Plains and given visual force here.
In 1844, Catlin published a selection of twenty-five images as lithographs in *Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio*, with accompanying text.
The most well-known of Catlin's buffalo paintings were the thirteen buffalo scenes included among those twenty-five prints — a portfolio of hand-colored lithographs first published in 1844 in England, directed mainly at well-to-do British patrons.
*Buffalo Hunt, Chase No. 5* was drawn on stone by McGahey and printed by Day & Haghe — London's pre-eminent lithographic firm. Among the first artists of European descent to travel west of the Mississippi, Catlin made five trips across the Great Plains during the 1830s, his project fueled largely by the fear that Native cultures and the great herds of American bison so important to them would soon vanish.
Each lithograph is both a work of art and an ethnographic document, reflecting Catlin's deep respect for the communities he encountered — and his belief that it was his duty to preserve the history of Native American cultures rapidly being displaced by westward expansion.
The immediacy of Catlin's images is irresistible, drawing viewers into the scenes with unprecedented intimacy. *Buffalo Hunt, Chase No. 5* earns its place on a wall precisely because it refuses stillness — it is a print that pulls at the peripheral vision, that suggests sound and dust and speed. It suits a study, a library, or a long hallway where the landscape format can breathe; it rewards natural light, which brings the hand-applied color alive. This is a work for viewers drawn to American history not as pageant but as witnessed experience — to the specific, irreplaceable moment on an open prairie when a rider and a bison were the only things in the world.
