Painted Buffalo Robe

Object Details

Donor Name

Mrs. Robert King

FROM CARD: "ORIGINALLY COLLECTED ABOUT 1865. CEREMONIAL DESIGNS PAINTED IN YELLOW, BLUE, AND RED, WITH HUNTING SCENE IN CENTRAL PANEL, MARGINED WITH LINEAR PATTERNS IN PARALLEL IN FORM OF V-SHAPE DEVICES. MAY BE CEREMONIAL. EXCELLENT CONDITION."

This hide fits within a category identified by John C. Ewers in his classic Plains Indian Painting (1939) as of dubious Indian origin. Later study by Christian Feest (1979) relying on published sources identified a number of closely related painted hides, which he speculated were produced among the western Chippewa in the last half of the 19th century as commodities for sale. Among features that led Feest to propose that they were by a single hand, this hide exhibits a vertical orientation, a broad complex border with hatching in red, yellow, and blue, and three overlapping circles with pendant lines below. Most distinctive are mended slits in the hide overpainted with blue designs of feathers or leaves. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian has a number of related hides, obtained without documentation from a variety of sources between 1904 and 1954, all cataloged as Chippewa/Ojibwa robes, presumably based on Merwin (1916). Other museums hold similar materials. Although the designation of Chippewa remains questionable for this and related robes, that identification has been added to the database to facilitate discovery and comparative study (2022). See: Ewers, John C. Plains Indian Painting: A Description of an Aboriginal American Art, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA 1939 Feest, Christian “Pictographic Skin Painting in Eastern North America,” Archiv fur Volkerkunde 1979, pp.85-104. Merwin, B.W. “Some Ojibway Buffalo Robes,” The Museum Journal (U Penn), 1916: pp.93-96

Record Last Modified

20 Jan 2022

Specimen Count

1

Culture

Chippewa (Ojibwe, Anishinaabe) (?)

Accession Date

14 May 1940

Accession Number

156398

USNM Number

E380671-0

Object Type

Artwork

Unknown - Object

183 cm

244 cm

Place

United States / Canada, North America

See more items in

Anthropology

NMNH - Anthropology Dept.

Topic

Ethnology

Record ID

nmnhanthropology_8416374

Metadata Usage (text)

CC0

GUID (Link to Original Record)

http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/3ac440514-9137-4010-bf98-bdd83d6817f0