Buffalo Bull, a Grand Pawnee Warrior

On the chest of Catlin's portrait of Buffalo Bull, a small painted buffalo head sits below a large silver peace medal. That painted buffalo is his totem, his personal medicine as a Grand Pawnee warrior. Catlin worked fast. In this 1832 sitting he painted only the face and the totem from life. The body and costume were supposed to be finished later in a studio on the East Coast. He never got back to it. Between 1830 and 1836 Catlin painted more than five hundred Native portraits across the Great Plains, racing to record specific people before Indian Removal treaties broke their nations. The unfinished half of this canvas is what happened to that race. Now at Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. @americanart