Buffalo+Hunt+on+the+Southwestern+Prairies

Date: 1845
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/1985/1985.66.248%252C932_1a.jpg?itok=Ytg4cPPU width="326" height="218" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/buffalo-hunt-on-the-southwestern-prairies-22853"]] || Title: **Buffalo Hunt on the Southwestern Prairies**

Artist: **John Mix Stanley** Born: Canandaigua, New York 1814 Died: Detroit, Michigan 1872

Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 60 3/4 x 40 1/2 in. (154.3 x 102.8 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the Misses Henry

Accession: 1985.66.248,932 || Stanley simply remarked of this painting of the Keechies tribe that it is “on the South-western Prairies” in the annotated catalogue of his portraits of North American Indians which he published in 1852. The Keechies tribe was originally from Texas near the Oklahoma Border. Perhaps then, even as now, the subject of an Indian buffalo hunt seemed so romantic as to need no further description. Stanley painted them while he had a studo in Fort Gibson, OK. That same year Stanley took his collection of Indian paintings to Washington, where they were put on display in the recently created Smithsonian Institution. Tragically, a fire in the Smithsonian Castle in January, 1865, destroyed all but a handful of the paintings in his Indian gallery.
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Although he traveled as widely as George Catlin in quest of his subject, Stanley differs from Catlin in that he made his initial records of Indian life with camera and pencil and postponed execution of this paintings until after his expeditions. He also organized his canvases in a self-conscious, academic manner; and lacking Catlin's empathy with the Indians and their cultures, he viewed them as an outsider, with no little condescension. In one sense, his paintings are valuable precisely as documentation of that widely shared attitude.


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Artist Biography <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px;">SAAM Collections Page
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