Stu-mick-o-sucks, Buffalo Bull's Back Fat, Head Chief, Blood Tribe
George Catlin (1796-1872) · 1832
Not currently on display. Second-floor galleries for eighteenth to early twentieth century art closed on 22 September 2025 for reinstallation and are scheduled to reopen on 6 November 2026; the museum's collection page listed this work as not on view during the closure. Confirm the gallery placement after reopening.
A Blackfoot chief faces you in a deerskin shirt fringed with hair and decorated with bands of porcupine quills, a necklace of grizzly bear claws across his chest and a long pipe held upright in his hands. His name, Buffalo Bull's Back Fat, refers to a prized cut of bison meat and was a mark of honour. Catlin painted him in the summer of 1832 at Fort Union, the fur trading post near the meeting of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, and considered it one of the finest portraits he ever made. Around it in the gallery hang dozens more faces and scenes from the same journeys.
Catlin was a self-taught painter who gave up law to record what he believed was a vanishing world. Between 1830 and 1836 he travelled thousands of miles up the Missouri and across the plains, painting more than fifty tribes. Look at the difference between the face, finished with real care and specific in its features, and the shirt and background, brushed in quickly so he could move on to the next sitter. That speed was necessary: he sometimes painted several portraits a day. The quill work, the claw necklace and the pipe are described accurately enough that they are still used by scholars of Blackfoot dress.
Catlin took his Indian Gallery of some five hundred paintings on tour to New York, London and Paris, where this portrait was shown at the Salon of 1846 and admired by Delacroix and Baudelaire. He hoped the government would buy the collection, but Congress refused, and he went bankrupt. A Philadelphia industrialist, Joseph Harrison, paid his debts and kept the paintings in a boiler factory; his widow gave them to the Smithsonian in 1879. The museum now shows them in a dense hang that recalls Catlin's own travelling exhibition.
Did You Know? Catlin's paintings spent years stored in a Philadelphia boiler factory before the owner's widow gave them to the Smithsonian in 1879.
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