Prairie Dog Village 1861 - 1869

George Catlin created this painting, "Prairie Dog Village," using oil on canvas, a popular choice at the time for artists documenting the American West. The smooth surface shows Catlin’s mastery of the medium. He carefully built up layers of thin glazes of paint, creating a sense of depth in the vast landscape. Note how the texture and color of the dry grasses subtly change from foreground to background. The oil paint allowed Catlin to capture fine details, from the individual prairie dog mounds to the figures on horseback in the distance. Although Catlin presented himself as a recorder of Indigenous life, his paintings were also commodities. They were made for sale to audiences back East, who were hungry for images of the West. Consider the labor of the artist, and the context of colonialism and expansion that frames this work. In the end, it is an artifact deeply embedded in the social and economic realities of its time.