Comanche Village, Women Dressing Robes and Drying Meat

About this artwork

“The village of the Camanchees,” George Catlin wrote, “is composed of six or eight hundred skin-covered lodges, made of poles and buffalo skins, in the manner precisely as those of the Sioux and other Missouri tribes . . . This village with its thousands of wild inmates, with horses and dogs, and wild sports and domestic occupations, presents a most curious scene; and the manners and looks of the people, a rich subject for the brush and the pen . . . In the view I have made of it, but a small po...

Art Historical Context

George Catlin's *Comanche Village, Women Dressinges and Drying Meat*1834–1835) captures a vivid snapshot of Comanche life on the Great Plains, painted during the artist's ambitious expedition to document Native American cultures before widespread European-American encroachment. As one of the first artists to venture into Comanche in 1834, Catlin sketched this scene firsthand, later transforming it into an oil painting that preserves a moment of everyday vitality in a village of 600–800 buffalo-skin lodges, akin to those of the Sioux. In the foreground, the chief's wigwam anchors the compositi...

About the Artist

George Catlin · 1796–1872

George Catlin (1796–1872), born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Putnam Catlin and Polly Sutton—who had been captured by Native Americans during the 1778 Battle of Wyoming—initially pursued a legal career. Trained at Litchfield Law School, he was admitted to the bar in 1819 but abandoned law after two years to study art in Philadelphia in 1823. Self-taught as a portraitist, Catlin quickly gained ...