George Catlin, born Wilkes-Barre, PA - Buffalo Hunt Chasing Back no. 12 - unknown - T-Shirt

Catlin's lithograph freezes a Plains buffalo hunt at full speed, with mounted hunters driving a charging bison bull through rolling, rocky country.

Visual Elements & Composition

The image is a rectangular landscape view, set within a sheet and mat border that frames the scene like a historic print. Parchment cream fills most of the field, with sepia brown and charcoal grey carrying the horses, hunters and bison, and pale grey softening the hills behind them. The mounted hunter on a galloping horse sits at the centre of the action, a rifle in hand, while the bull bison lunges forward and a herd recedes into the distance. Movement, not detail, drives the composition.

Meaning & Symbolism

George Catlin, born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, dedicated much of his career to recording the lives of North American Indigenous peoples. Scenes like this one show the buffalo hunt as a central practice of Plains nations, a source of food, shelter, clothing and cultural life, and they show the horsemanship and coordinated strategy that sustained those herds over generations. Catlin worked in the mid-nineteenth century, when he believed these ways of life were fading under westward expansion, and the print preserves that world as he saw it.

Wearing the Artwork

A tee carries this scene across the chest, so the hunt reads at a glance from across the room and the horses and bison stay in view as you move. The sleeve and collar details keep the piece quiet, letting the lithograph's sepia and parchment tones lead the look. It suits a shirt worn every day, the way a print on a wall is lived with rather than admired once.