# White Sand Bluffs, on Santa Rosa Island, Near Pensacola

- By: George Catlin (born Wilkes-Barre, PA 1796-died Jersey City, NJ 1872)
- Date: 1834-1835
- Medium: oil on canvas
- Classification: Paintings
- Dimensions: 19 1/2 x 27 1/2 in. (49.6 x 69.9 cm)
- Culture: Indians of North America
- Credit line: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.
- Museum: [Smithsonian Institution](https://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=4458)
- Rights: [CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://invisiblenetwork.ai/thumbs/web/8507be41f35c843aadf643285e24466a.jpg
- Who can see it: Tweens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

George Catlin painted this scene in the winter of 1834-35, during his visit to Florida. “This sketch,” he later wrote, “was made on Santa Rosa Island, within a few miles of Pensacola . . . The hills of sand are as purely white as snow, and fifty or sixty feet in height, and supporting on their tops, and in their sides, clusters of magnolia bushes---of myrtle---of palmetto and heather, all of which are evergreens, forming the most vivid contrast with the snow-white sand in which they are growing. On the beach a family of Seminole Indians are encamped, catching and drying red fish, their chief article of food.” (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 36, 1841, reprint 1973; Truettner, The Natural Man Observed, 1979)