Comanche War Party, Mounted on Wild Horses

George Catlin was a self-taught American painter who abandoned a law career to document Native American life on the Great Plains. Between 1830 and 1836 he traveled from St. Louis up the Missouri River and across the southern Plains, visiting fifty tribes and producing more than 500 paintings and sketches. Comanche War Party, Mounted on Wild Horses was painted between 1834 and 1837. Comanche warriors on horseback charge across a green prairie under a wide pink-gray sky, carrying shields and lances, some leaning low to the sides of their horses. A line of trees rises at the right. The figures are small against the landscape, painted quickly in ochres and reds. Catlin's Indian Gallery — the full collection of paintings and artifacts — was donated to the Smithsonian in 1879.