About this work
The *North American Indian Portfolio* comprises twenty-five lithographs on paper, each measuring approximately 22⅞ by 17¾ inches. The prints arrive in a palette that still commands the room — earthy ochres and burnt siennas anchoring the land, vivid reds and blues animating the figures against open sky and prairie. The lithographs range from portraits to tribal ceremonies, from the anecdotal to the idealized, and the subjects are rendered with an intimacy rarely seen in images of their era. Scenes of buffalo hunts on horseback appear among them, and Catlin's romantic images capture the drama and excitement of the hunters' feats of skill.
An introductory plate combines three distinct portraits — an Osage Warrior, an Iroquois, and a Pawnee woman — each shown in modes of dress and ornamentation that exhibit the characteristic differences of their tribes. Across every plate, the figures are specific human beings, not symbols — which is precisely what sets these images apart.
Catlin published the portfolio in London in 1844 under the full title *Hunting Scenes and Amusements of the Rocky Mountains and Prairies of America*, issuing a selection of twenty-five images as lithographs with twenty pages of accompanying text.
The portfolio contains the results of his years of painting, living with, and traveling among the Great Plains Indians — work done against the clock, as Catlin saw no future for either their way of life or their very existence. From 1832 to 1837, he spent the summer months sketching the tribes and then finished his pictures in oils during the winter.
When he first issued the portfolio in 1844, his animated, colorful, sympathetic views of Native Americans finally filled a void of imagery that neither Lewis and Clark's journals nor any prior account had been able to fill. Because most of Catlin's paintings and collections were later destroyed by fire and neglect, his lithographs remain the principal medium by which his message was conveyed — making these prints not only works of art but irreplaceable historical documents. Scholars have ranked the *North American Indian Portfolio* as one of the most impressive books of Western Americana, behind only the Bodmer atlas and the Edward Curtis portfolios among major illustrated works on the West.
On the wall, a print from this portfolio anchors a room with genuine historical gravity — the kind that rewards close looking rather than demanding it. It sits well in a study, a library, or a well-lit hallway: anywhere a considered, rather than decorative, sensibility governs the space. Whether depicting a Blackfoot stepping over a buffalo's back or a group of Sioux dancing in bearskins, Catlin let his admiration for the Plains Indians show through his
