NO. 7 WHITE INFLUENCE ON INDIAN PAINTING—EWERS 5 
The Prince and the artist ascended the Missouri on an American 
Fur Company steamer in 1833. (See Bodmer’s own field portraits 
of himself and the Prince, pl. 4, fig. 2.) They met some of the 
Mandan briefly on their way upriver in June. In the fall of that year, 
after more than a month of observation and picturemaking among 
the Blackfoot near Fort McKenzie, they returned to Fort Clark. 
There they spent the winter from November 8, 1833, to April 18, 
1834, a period of more than five months. James Kipp, the fur 
company’s manager of Fort Clark, provided the German nobleman 
and his artist associate with a whitewashed room in a newly built 
wooden building within the fort which served them as living quarters, 
studio, and workroom. Throughout their stay, Bodmer worked as- 
siduously drawing and painting the likenesses of Mandan and other 
neighboring Indians in his studio, and scenes in the nearby Indian 
villages. He worked slowly and methodically, sometimes taking a full 
day or longer to complete a single portrait or view. During this 
period he created some of the most exact, realistic pictures of Ameri- 
can Indians ever executed. These pictures possess a remarkable 
sharpness and depth of focus. Not only are the faces of the Indians 
truthful likenesses, but the minute details of costume and ornament 
are precisely delineated. 
Although Catlin introduced realistic portraiture to the Mandan, 
the superior draughtsman, Carl Bodmer, showed them how every 
detail of a picture could be rendered with absolute truthfulness. 
Bodmer was the missionary par excellence of the white man’s tradi- 
tion of realism in art. 
Nor was Bodmer content merely to exhibit his own work among 
the Indians. He furnished some of them with paper and watercolors, 
and encouraged them to make pictures for him and for Prince Maxi- 
milian. In the collections belonging to the estate of Prince Maxi- 
milian zu Wied are no less than nine original Indian drawings on 
paper, collected during Maximilian and Bodmer’s trip to the Upper 
Missouri in 1833-34. 
THE CHANGING ART STYLE OF FOUR BEARS, MANDAN CHIEF 
Both Catlin and Prince Maximilian considered Four Bears the 
most remarkable man in the Mandan tribe. Although he held the 
rank of second chief, he was his people’s most popular leader. He 
was the son of a prominent warrior, Handsome Child. Four Bears 
himself, though of slight build and medium stature, claimed to have 
killed 5 enemy chiefs and to have taken 14 scalps. Upon his return 
