Stu-mick-o-súcks,+Buffalo+Bull's+Back+Fat,+Head+Chief,+Blood+Tribe

Date: 1832
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/1985/1985.66.149_1a.jpg&max=460 width="279" height="337" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=3949"]] || Title: **Stu-mick-o-súcks, Buffalo Bull's Back Fat, Head Chief, Blood Tribe**

Artist: **George Catlin** Born: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania 1796 Died: Jersey City, New Jersey 1872

Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 29 x 24 in. (73.7 x 60.9 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.

Accession: 1985.66.149 || This magnificent portrait was painted at Fort Union “from the free and vivid realities of life” rather than “the haggard deformities and distortions of disease and death” that George Catlin noted among frontier Indians. Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat (named after a prized cut of bison) was a chief of the Blackfoot, a tribe of the northernmost Plains whose territory straddled the present-day border between the United States and Canada. Catlin considered the people of the northern Plains the least corrupted by white contact, and he helped establish their image as nature’s noble people in Europe as well as America. This commanding portrait, for example, was exhibited to favorable notice in the Paris Salon of 1846. (Gurney and Heyman, eds., //George Catlin and His Indian Gallery//, 2002)
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Catlin Classroom Map of George Catlin's Route Artist George Catlin: Painter Of American Indian Portraits - Wisconsin Public Radio
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