Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Shin-ga-wás-sa, Handsome Bird
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
George Catlin described Handsome Bird, a member of the Osage/Wa-zha-zhe I-e tribe, as a “splendid-looking fellow, six feet eight inches high; with war-club and quiver.” In a different account about manners, customs and conditions, the artist described the war club as “another civilized refinement, with a blade of steel, of eight or ten inches in length, and set in a club, studded around and ornamented with some hundreds of brass nails.” Catlin painted this work at Fort Gibson (in present-day Oklahoma) in 1834. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 1, no. 29, 1841, reprint 1973, and 1848 Catalogue, Catlin’s Indian Gallery, SAAM online exhibition)
