George Catlin's "Buffalo Hunt on Snowshoes"
A MONA Moment |
 |
George Catlin was one of America's original artist-explorers. During the 1830's, he set out to complete a comprehensive pictorial record of the life and culture of the Plains Indians. His work remains one of the great achievements in American art.
What captured the interest of easterners and Europeans in Catlin's work was not his portraits of native Americans. Many plains Indians had visited urban areas of the east, and their images were well known and documented. What was new and interesting in Catlin's work was his depiction of typical scenes of Indian life against the backdrop of the plains landscape, until then unknown: giant lodge teepees made from as many as twenty-five buffalo skins; bands of Sioux moving their camps with dogs pulling sleds loaded with bundles; buffalo chases with bows, arrows and lances, the Sioux scalp dance, earth lodges, grizzly bears, torture ceremony of the Mandan, prairie teeming with buffalo, war parties, huge crowds of Indians playing ball sports-it was a panorama and spectacle unknown to the rest of the world.
One of these scenes in the collection of the Museum of Nebraska Art - a lithograph print by Catlin titled Buffalo Hunt On Snow Shoes - has special merit both as art, and as story.
It is a winter scene, two Indians have cornered a buffalo against a stand of snow covered firtress. The hunter on the left thrusts a lance into the side of the buffalo that has collapsed in the snow. On the right the hunter has a bowstring pulled back taut, the large, menacing arrowhead braced against the bow and pointed at the bull's head. The bull's eyes are slightly cross eyed and vague, blood pours in a stream from the spike of the lance in his side. There is a clear, balletic grace in the image of the Indian with the bow. His pointed snow shoes arc upward toward the curve of his legs, a curve which carries our eyes up through the quiver with its arrows On up through the graceful, sweep of his torso climaxing abruptly in the powerful diagonals of his arms pushing the bow and pulling the string for maximum tension. The strong diagonals of the arrow and the lance are clearly designed by Catlin to focus our eye on the head of that bull and that haunting, depleted, half dead gaze staring directly out at us.
A disarming footnote: falling down from the back of the Indian with the bow is the skin of a fox, it looks alive, and it too stares malignantly at the helpless bison. This vignette is in the foreground of the print, in the lower left quarter of the frame. In the foreground and middle ground of the fight of the print, another drama is taking place. Another Bison is down, bleeding profusely on the snow, there to the left. Behind him, receding in the distance, the bison cows are galloping, retreating through drifts of snow. The snow covered hills behind them are three stylized round tops, of almost identical shape, each diminishing in size behind each other like visual echoes, the line of their slopes falling directly into the retreating buffaloes farthest from our eyes, just at the far left border of the print. Catlin cleverly, powerfully, dramatizes the headlong rush of the buffalo retreat through his composition. A line of buffaloes in the middle distance charges through the snow at the tail end of the stampede, below them dark, shaded trails left by the retreating animals aide sweep our eyes left like a jet stream, the elegant line of the slope above them reinforces the line of this wild, desperate stampede through the snow heading left at breakneck speed.
A subtle, dark cloud of ice crystals hovers over the hills and suggests the intense, cold conditions of the prairie in winter. The bold lines and flat, broad areas of color, the strong, sweeping lines of the composition suggest the elegant power of Japanese artist Hokusai, who interestingly, was contemporaneous with Catlin. The excitement, pathos and drama of this work fixed the imagination and growing appetite of the world for the romance and allure of the west.
