George CatlinAmerican, 1796–1872Wild Horses at Play
Can I see it?
Unknown
Where is “Wild Horses at Play” now? Collection: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Unknown.
Washington, D.C., United States
The owner is known; whether it is on view today is not.
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the painting
“There is no other animal on the prairies so wild and so sagacious as the horse . . . I made many attempts to approach them by stealth, when they were grazing and playing their gambols, without ever having been more than once able to succeed. In this instance, I left my horse, and with my friend Chadwick, skulked through a ravine for a couple of miles; until we were at length brought within gun-shot of a fine herd of them, when I used my pencil for some time, while we were under cover of a little hedge of bushes which effectually screened us from their view. In this herd we saw all the colours, nearly, that can be seen in a kennel of English hounds. Some were milk white, some jet black---others were sorrel, and bay, and cream colour---many were of an iron grey; and others were pied, containing a variety of colours on the same animal.
Read on
Their manes were very profuse, and hanging in the wildest confusion over their necks and faces---and their long tails swept the ground.” George Catlin sketched this scene on a dragoon expedition in 1834, and probably completed the painting in his studio between 1835 and 1837. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 41, 1841, reprint 1973; Truettner, The Natural Man Observed, 1979)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Details
- Accession number
- 1985.66.499
What it shows
In the catalog
Sources
- Smithsonian American Art Museum
- Image: Smithsonian American Art Museum — CC0
In the life of George Catlin
The whole life1830–1836
Five journeys into the American West
St. Louis was his base for the five trips and the steamer Yellowstone of the American Fur Company his first transport; he visited 48 tribes in all (other accounts say about fifty). On trips along the Arkansas, Red and Mississippi rivers, in Florida and around the Great Lakes he painted more than 500 pictures and gathered a substantial collection of artifacts.
1832
Up the Missouri to Fort Union
He ascends the Missouri more than 3,000 km to the Fort Union trading post (today on the North Dakota–Montana border) and spends several weeks among peoples little touched by European culture. Visiting eighteen tribes, among them the Pawnee, Omaha, Ponca, Mandan, Hidatsa, Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine and Blackfeet, he paints the most vivid portraits of his career.
1836
First exhibition: about 500 works
Catlin’s first exhibition takes place in the United States, with about 500 works, but it makes little public stir.
1838
The Indian Gallery and public lectures
Back in the East, he gathers his paintings and Native artifacts into his own Indian Gallery and begins giving lectures on life among the Indians, touring Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and New York with the show. The paintings hang salon-style, in rows one above another, and visitors identify them by catalogue numbers.
May 1838
Congress declines to buy the Indian Gallery
The U.S. Congress rebuffs his offer to sell the collection: Catlin wanted his life’s work kept intact, but his later efforts to persuade officials in Washington failed as well.
November 1839
Moves his family to England
Finding no response in America to his view of Native culture, and hoping for a more receptive audience after Congress turned him down, he takes his family and collection across the Atlantic to England.
