Orejona Indians

Orejona Indians of 1874, in the National Gallery of Art, belongs to Catlin's South American series made in the final years of his life when the artist — famous for his North American Indian portraits of the 1830s — travelled to Central and South America to document indigenous peoples he believed were equally at risk from European colonisation and cultural assimilation. Catlin made these late works largely from memory and from sketches, and they have a different quality from his earlier direct observational portraits — more generalised, more mediated by the conventions of romantic ethnographic illustration. The NGA holds a large collection of Catlin's South American works as a record of the final phase of a career dedicated to visual documentation of indigenous peoples across the Americas.

The South American paintings differ technically from Catlin's early North American portraits in their more fluid sketch-like application that suggests memory and reconstruction rather than direct observation. Figures are placed in landscape settings described with loose atmospheric handling, the paint moving quickly across the surface to establish scene rather than detailed portraiture.