Riccarree Chief and His Wife

Executed in 1861, this oil on card mounted on paperboard was created by George Catlin. Following the artist's death in 1872, the work passed by descent to his daughters: Clara Gregory Catlin, Louise Catlin Kinney, and Elizabeth Wing Catlin. In 1912, the American Museum of Natural History purchased the painting directly from Elizabeth Wing Catlin.

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

The painting Riccarree Chief and His Wife (1861) is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It entered the museum's collection by gift in 1965 from Paul Mellon, who had acquired it in 1959 from Kennedy Galleries after it was sold by the American Museum of Natural History, which had obtained the work by descent from George Catlin’s daughters in 1912. The work’s accession number is not specified in the sources. Exhibition records are not mentioned in the available documentation.

Riccarree Chief and His Wife, painted by George Catlin in 1865, presents a portrait of an Indigenous couple. This oil on card work is part of Catlin's extensive effort to document Native American cultures through visual art. The composition features the chief and his wife seated beside a tree, a common motif in his extensive body of work that aimed to preserve a record of various tribal groups during a period of significant change on the American frontier.

Before dedicating himself to painting, George Catlin practiced law. His career shift was driven by a profound interest in Native American cultures, which he observed firsthand during his travels across the American frontier. This painting from 1865 is a product of his lifelong commitment to creating a visual record of Indigenous peoples, whose ways of life he believed were rapidly changing due to westward expansion.