La Salle Claiming Louisiana for France. April 9, 1682

George Catlin

National Gallery of Art

About twenty pale-skinned men and eighteen Indigenous people with medium-toned skin sit or stand in a gathering by a water’s edge in this horizontal landscape painting. Most of the people’s attention are focused on a pale-skinned man who stands and holds a rifle across his torso in one arm and gestures with the other hand extended. He wears a brown suit, dark hat, a red, knee-length cloak, and a sword hangs at one hip. He motions toward a rudimentary cross that stands upright in the marshy grass next to a white flag on a pole. A ring of mostly pale-skinned men sit or stand around this, though one of those seated there appears to have red-colored skin and wear a feathered headdress. These men wear brown pants and brown or blue coats with dark hats. Other Indigenous people with long black hair and some with red face paint stand or sit in an outer ring around the central action. Some of these people are bare-chested and some wear tawny-brown wraps, cloaks, or garments. Eight canoes are lined up along the zigzagging water’s edge in the left half of the painting, and people fish from two of them. The far coastline is lined with green and brown strokes, suggesting trees. Copper-brown clouds sweep across the sky, which darkens from pale yellow along the horizon, halfway up the composition, to blue along the top. The painting appears to be surrounded with a wide brown frame with a slip of paper reading “22” at the top center, but this is all painted and drawn. The artist signed the painting in the lower right corner of the landscape, "G. Catlin P.”