Pacapacurus Village

Pacapacurus Village of 1873, in the National Gallery of Art, depicts a settlement of the Pacapacuru people in what is now northwestern Peru. By the time Catlin made this work, he was in his late seventies and working from a combination of observation during his South American travels and reconstruction in the studio, producing a visual record that was as much a defence of indigenous peoples' humanity and cultural distinctiveness as a pure topographic document. His earlier writings accompanying his North American Indian Gallery had argued that indigenous cultures were being destroyed by colonisation and needed to be preserved in paint if not in fact; the South American series extends this mission to peoples whose situations were at least as dire.

The village setting is rendered with attention to the basic forms of indigenous domestic architecture — communal structures, cleared ground, surrounding vegetation — placed within a landscape described in broad atmospheric strokes. Catlin does not attempt ethnographic precision in this late work but rather establishes the presence of a functioning human community within a specific natural environment.