La Salle Meets a War Party of Cenis Indians on a Texas Prairie. April 25, 1686

George Catlin executed this oil on canvas in 1848. Following the artist's death in 1872, the work passed by descent to his three daughters: Clara Gregory Catlin, Louise Catlin Kinney, and Elizabeth Wing Catlin. In 1912 the American Museum of Natural History purchased the painting from Elizabeth Wing Catlin.

The museum retained ownership until 1959, when it sold the piece through Kennedy Galleries of New York to Paul Mellon of Upperville, Virginia. Mellon subsequently donated the work to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1965, where it remains part of the permanent collection.

George Catlin’s oil on canvas, titled La Salle Meets a War Party of Cenis Indians on a Texas Prairie, April 25, 1686, was completed in 1848. The composition presents a solitary tree on a flat landscape, beneath which a European explorer in a long coat exchanges a handshake with a group of Cenis warriors adorned with feathered headdresses and spears.

The painting visualizes a historic encounter between René‑Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and the Cenis tribe during the explorer’s 1686 expedition across what is now Texas. By foregrounding the diplomatic gesture, Catlin emphasizes the moment of cultural contact amid a broader narrative of frontier expansion.

Created during a period when American artists were increasingly interested in historic and ethnographic subjects, the painting aligns with Catlin’s mission to preserve a visual record of Native American life. It also mirrors mid‑nineteenth‑century fascination with the nation’s colonial past and the mythic frontier.