Painted Buffalo Robe
date: label: Accession Date
content: 14 May 1940
name: label: Donor Name
content: Mrs. Robert King
notes: label: Notes
content: 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."
label: Notes
content: 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
label: Record Last Modified
content: 20 Jan 2022
label: Specimen Count
content: 1
place: label: Place
content: United States / Canada, North America
topic: label: Topic
content: Ethnology
culture: label: Culture
content: Chippewa (Ojibwe, Anishinaabe) (?)
setName: label: See more items in
content: Anthropology
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: NMNH - Anthropology Dept.
identifier: label: Accession Number
content: 156398
label: USNM Number
content: E380671-0
objectType: label: Object Type
content: Artwork
physicalDescription: label: Unknown - Object
content: 183 cm
label: Unknown - Object
content: 244 cm