The Handsome Dance - Goo-a-give

Created during the 1850s and 1860s as part of Catlin's Cartoon Collection, the painting remained with the artist until his death in 1872. It then descended to his daughters, Clara Gregory Catlin, Louise Catlin Kinney, and Elizabeth Wing Catlin. In 1912, the American Museum of Natural History in New York purchased the work from Elizabeth Wing Catlin. When the museum deaccessioned parts of the collection, Paul Mellon acquired it in 1959 through Kennedy Galleries in New York. Mellon gifted the painting to the National Gallery of Art in 1965. It has since been exhibited internationally, including shows in Nashville in 1971, Wilkes-Barre in 1973, Washington in 1980, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Santiago from 1989 to 1990, Oneonta in 1992, and Coral Gables in 1994.

This work belongs to Catlin's Cartoon Collection, his second major project comprising over 600 works created during the 1850s and 1860s. This followed his earlier Indian Gallery, a collection of more than 500 paintings from the 1830s now largely housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Catlin spent his career documenting Indigenous cultures he believed were vanishing due to American expansion, traveling extensively and publishing his observations. He faced considerable financial difficulties and struggled to sell his first collection to the United States government. He exhibited the Cartoon Collection in New York in 1871, publishing a descriptive catalog that provided the ethnographic details for this painting, but the endeavor failed to yield substantial financial returns.

The painting has been featured in National Gallery of Art publications, including illustrated catalogues from 1970, 1980, and 1992, cementing its place in the institutional record of American art. As part of the 351 Cartoon Collection works gifted by Paul Mellon, it contributes to the broader historical and ethnographic understanding of South American Indigenous cultures as recorded by Catlin. The 1989 to 1990 traveling exhibition to Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Santiago, organized by the United States Information Agency, specifically highlighted Catlin's South American subjects, bringing this visual record of the Gooagive people to audiences in the regions the artist originally visited.