Pah ta coo chee, Shooting Cedar, a Brave

Description

American realism took an unusual turn in the nineteenth century when painters travelled west to document Native peoples before, as they believed, those ways of life vanished under settlement. George Catlin was among the most determined of these artists, producing hundreds of portraits across the Great Plains and the upper Missouri. Pah ta coo chee, Shooting Cedar, a Brave, belongs to that project, a single figure rendered with the direct, unembellished attention Catlin gave to every sitter he painted.

About Pah Ta Coo Chee, Shooting Cedar,

The composition keeps its focus tight on the subject, a Native brave identified by name and by the title given to the work, a practice that set Catlin apart from artists who painted native peoples as anonymous types. The pose is upright and composed, the features rendered with care, and the costume and adornment recorded with the kind of accuracy that made his portraits valuable as historical documents as much as art. Catlin worked quickly in the field, often with limited materials, and that urgency shows in the directness of the brushwork and the confidence of the outline against a plain or lightly worked ground.

Colour in the original is restrained, built from earth tones and muted reds and browns that let the face and the details of dress carry the picture. Light falls evenly, without theatrical shadow, which keeps the attention on the sitter rather than on atmosphere or drama. This plainness of method is part of what makes the picture endure. It reads as observation first, and only second as composition, which is exactly what Catlin intended when he set out to record a way of life he feared was disappearing.

ByMuseum recreates this portrait as a museum quality oil painting reproduction, painted entirely by hand on artist-grade canvas by a trained painter working from the original palette and structure. Nothing here is printed. The brushwork is laid down stroke by stroke, the tonal transitions built up in oil the way Catlin built them, and the surface carries the texture and slight irregularity that only paint produces. The result is a physical object with depth, not a flat facsimile, made for a buyer who wants the weight and presence of a real painting rather than a reproduction on paper.

The hand-painted reproduction

The appeal of this image has not faded because the record it keeps has not faded. A face, a name, a moment held still by a painter who thought it worth keeping. Owning a hand-painted version of that record puts a piece of that attention on your own wall.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, not a print
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your space
• Gallery-ready presentation, ready to hang
• Certificate of authenticity included
• 90 day returns with a full refund or a free replacement, no restocking fee