Four Fuegian Indians

Four Fuegian Indians of 1874, in the National Gallery of Art, depicts people from Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago at the southern tip of South America whose inhabitants had fascinated and disturbed European explorers since Magellan's era. Charles Darwin's account of the Fuegians he encountered during the Beagle voyage in 1832 — including the complicated story of Jemmy Button and other Fuegians brought to England and returned — was well known to the educated public by the time Catlin painted this group. Catlin's four Fuegians are presented with the same documentary respect he brought to all indigenous subjects, their distinctive physical appearance and dress recorded without the condescension or mockery that characterised other European visual treatments of the same peoples.

The four figures are arranged across the canvas in an arrangement that suggests documentation rather than pictorial drama — Catlin's interest is in recording appearances rather than constructing narrative. Each figure's face and dress receives individual attention within the overall loose late handling, the paint describing distinctive features with more specificity than the generalised landscape setting.