Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Pa-hú-sha, White Hair, the Younger, a Band Chief
George Catlin (born Wilkes-Barre, PA 1796-died Jersey City, NJ 1872)
1834
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 29 x 24 in. (73.7 x 60.9 cm)
- Culture
- Osage Indians
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
“The White Hair is another distinguished leader of the Osages; and some have awarded to him the title of Head Chief; but in the jealous feelings of rivalry which have long agitated this tribe, and some times, even endangered its peace, I believe it has been generally agreed that his claims are third in the tribe; though he justly claims the title of a chief, and a very gallant and excellent man. The portrait of this man, I regret to say, I did not get.” George Catlin probably painted this image at Fort Gibson (in present-day Oklahoma) in 1834. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 38, 1841, reprint 1973; Truettner, The Natural Man Observed, 1979)
