NO. 7 WHITE INFLUENCE ON INDIAN PAINTING—EWERS 9 
of a woman who had stolen it. On April 10, Yellow Feather left to 
join a large Hidatsa and Mandan war party against an enemy tribe. 
But sometime before his leavetaking, Yellow Feather painted at least 
two pictures in watercolors on paper for the Prince’s collection. One 
of these I here reproduce as plate 12, with the very kind permission 
of Karl Viktor Prince zu Wied. The style of painting the human 
and animal figures exhibited by this picture, though crude, is a far 
cry from the simple figures of traditional Mandan picture writing. 
The rider sits astride his horse rather than on top of it. His face 
is shown in profile and considerable emphasis is given to a realistic 
representation of the human eye. The eye of the horse, both the 
white and the ball, are shown with an equal concern for detail. The 
ears, nostril, and mouth are delineated. There is some grace in the 
entire horse figure. The hoofs are realistically formed in contrast 
to the hooklike conventionalized hoofs of traditional Mandan pic- 
tography. The figures have some degree of roundness achieved by 
elementary color modeling which is less apparent in the photographic 
reproduction than in the full-colored original. Although we have 
no earlier example of Yellow Feather’s art with which to compare 
this painting, I believe the influence of the white artists Catlin and 
Bodmer is reflected in this example of the effort of a young Mandan 
artist to portray details and to achieve realism in his figure painting. 
CONCLUSIONS 
The foregoing data provide perhaps the best documented case 
history of the influence of the European artistic tradition of realism 
upon the painting style of primitive American Indian artists of a 
century and a quarter ago. The details of this documentation are 
indeed remarkable. We know the characteristics of traditional Man- 
dan Indian picture writing as it was practiced prior to and at the 
time of these Indians’ introduction to the European art tradition. We 
know who the missionaries of the European tradition were (George 
Catlin and Carl Bodmer), and when they were active among the 
Mandan (1832-34). We know that these white men demonstrated 
the objectives and methods of realistic drawing and painting to the 
Mandan, and that they actively encouraged the efforts of native 
artists. We know who two of those artists were (Four Bears and 
Yellow Feather). We know that these Indians posed for both white 
artists a total of six times and that they watched the white men paint 
numerous portraits of other Indians. We have examples of the paint- 
ing of one native artist prior to the visits of Catlin and Bodmer, 
