Assinneboine Warrior and His Family

George Catlin painted Assinneboine Warrior and His Family in 1861, creating an oil on card work classified as a portrait. The painting descended through Catlin’s daughters, Clara Gregory Catlin, Louise Catlin Kinney, and Elizabeth Wing Catlin, before being purchased in 1912 from Elizabeth Wing Catlin by the American Museum of Natural History. It later passed through Kennedy Galleries, New York, and was sold in 1959 to Paul Mellon of Upperville, VA.

In 1965, Paul Mellon gifted the artwork to the National Gallery of Art, where it remains in the collection today.

Assinneboine Warrior and His Family is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it entered the collection in 1965 as a gift from Mr. Paul Mellon of Upperville, Virginia. Mellon had acquired the painting in 1959 through Kennedy Galleries in New York, which had purchased it from the American Museum of Natural History that same year. The American Museum of Natural History had originally acquired the work in 1912, buying it from Elizabeth Wing Catlin, one of George Catlin's three daughters, who had inherited it from her father along with her sisters Clara Gregory Catlin and Louise Catlin Kinney.

No exhibition history beyond this chain of ownership is recorded in the available sources.

Created in 1865, Assinneboine Warrior and His Family is an oil painting executed on card that has been affixed to a paperboard support. The work presents a small group of four figures positioned in an open landscape, centered on a male figure adorned with a feathered headdress and a fur loincloth, while the accompanying women and child are clothed in light‑colored garments.

The work belongs to a broader series of images Catlin produced to document Plains tribes during a period of rapid change on the American frontier. By the mid‑19th century, such visual records served both as ethnographic evidence and as a means of preserving a way of life that was increasingly threatened by expansion and policy.