About this work
The eye enters this image from every edge at once. *Buffalo Hunt Surround — No. 9* is a toned lithograph with applied watercolor , and its subject — the "surround" — dictates its structure: riders on horseback form a tightening ring around a herd of buffalo on the open prairie, closing off every escape route. The composition has an almost centrifugal energy, figures pressing inward from the margins toward the churning mass of animals at the center. The palette is the khaki and burnt sienna of the Great Plains in full sun, cut through with the dark bulk of the bison and the movement of horses at full gallop. There is no heroic central figure, no single protagonist — only the collective momentum of the hunt, a strategy requiring precision, coordination, and nerve.
Published in 1844 , this print appeared as part of Catlin's *North American Indian Portfolio*, a selection of twenty-five lithographs
— among the most well-known of his buffalo works — first published in England and directed at a well-heeled British audience . By this point Catlin was exhibiting in London, having spent the previous decade on the Plains. Though he had firsthand experiences, he frequently composed his prints in the studio from memory; the portfolio was the culmination of years of travel and observation, rendered through the technical expertise of printers Day & Haghe.
His project was fueled largely by the fear that Native cultures and the great herds of buffalo so important to them would soon vanish — a premonition that gave every image in the portfolio the weight of a document as much as a work of art. Catlin understood the importance of the buffalo to the Plains Indians and blamed fur traders for decimating their populations , a tension that charges the *Surround* with something more than spectacle.
As wall art, this print rewards rooms that can hold a little wildness — a study, a library, a den with natural light and warm wood tones that echo the ochres and browns of the open prairie. The immediacy of Catlin's images is irresistible, drawing viewers into the scenes with unprecedented intimacy. It speaks to those drawn to the American West not as myth but as lived history — to collectors who want something that carries genuine stakes. The *Surround* is not a decoration; it is a record of a world in motion, made by a man who understood he was watching it disappear.
