After the Buffalo Chase - Sioux

After the Buffalo Chase — Sioux of 1873, in the National Gallery of Art, revisits one of the central subjects of Catlin's earlier North American work from the 1830s and 1840s. The Sioux buffalo hunt had been one of Catlin's most celebrated subjects in his original Indian Gallery, and this late reworking suggests the artist returning in old age to material that had defined his reputation, perhaps to complete the visual record or from the persistence of powerful memories. By 1873 the great bison herds of the Great Plains were being systematically destroyed by commercial hunters, and the buffalo chase scenes Catlin had witnessed as living practice had already become historical memory. The late version carries this elegiac awareness even if it does not explicitly name it.

The composition retains the horizontal sweep of action characteristic of Catlin's best Plains hunting scenes, with hunters on horseback pursuing the herd across a wide open landscape. The late paint handling is looser than his 1830s work, the figures and animals more summary in their execution, but the dynamic organisation of the scene across the picture plane remains effective.