La Salle Received in the Village of the Cenis Indians. May 6, 1686

Catlin rendered the scene with smooth, descriptive brushwork, paying careful attention to costume details and landscape elements. The composition features a broad landscape under a wide sky filled with pink, lavender, and gray clouds, suggesting the diffused light of dawn or dusk. The palette combines earthy browns and greens in the landscape with soft pastel tones in the sky. The painting functions within the visual tropes of Western romantic history painting, utilizing a carefully orchestrated theatricality. Catlin meticulously details the physiognomy and attire of each figure, contrasting the natural materials of the Indigenous dwellings and garments with the crisp, manufactured linen and structured coats of the European colonizers. The painting is signed lower left as G. Catlin p. and is mounted within a wide olive-green border featuring a numbered plaque reading 25 at the top center.

Created as part of Catlin's Cartoon Collection, the painting remained with the artist until his death in 1872. It then 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 in New York purchased the surviving works of the Cartoon Collection from Elizabeth Wing Catlin. When the museum deaccessioned the collection, Paul Mellon acquired more than 300 of these paintings through Kennedy Galleries in 1959. Mellon subsequently gifted 351 works, including this painting, to the National Gallery of Art in 1965. The work has been exhibited widely, including displays in St. Louis, Peoria, Fort Worth, Nashville, Corpus Christi, Phoenix, and Buffalo, focusing on themes of western expansion and La Salle's voyages.

During the mid-19th century, George Catlin produced two major collections of Native American portraits, genre scenes, and western landscapes. His first collection, the Indian Gallery, comprised over 500 works from the 1830s and largely resides at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The second, the Cartoon Collection, numbered over 600 works created during the 1850s and 1860s. This painting belongs to the latter group, which Catlin exhibited in New York in 1871 alongside a published catalog. As a history painting, the work engages with the theme of United States westward expansion, interpreting a 17th-century historical event through the aesthetic and ideological frameworks of the 19th century. The catalog entry for this specific work was listed as Cart. No. 445.