This painting shows a scene with people engaged in a sport or game. The people wear vibrant clothes in shades of brown, orange, yellow, pink, and green, embellished with feathers and silver jewelry. The people all have light brown skin and long dark hair, and many of them have feathers in their hair. All the people in the middle of the painting hold sticks with small nets at the end, and they all appear to be lunging towards a small ball on the ground. In the background is a dramatic landscape with tall purple mountains, green hills, and large pink-and-white clouds sweeping across the blue sky.
Read the visual description

This painting shows a scene with people engaged in a sport or game. The people wear vibrant clothes in shades of brown, orange, yellow, pink, and green, embellished with feathers and silver jewelry. The people all have light brown skin and long dark hair, and many of them have feathers in their hair. All the people in the middle of the painting hold sticks with small nets at the end, and they all appear to be lunging towards a small ball on the ground. In the background is a dramatic landscape with tall purple mountains, green hills, and large pink-and-white clouds sweeping across the blue sky.

National Gallery of Art · Painting

Ball Playing among the Sioux Indians

Seth Eastman

Date
1851
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 71.4 × 103.2 cm (28 1/8 × 40 5/8 in.) framed: 90.8 × 121.9 × 11.4 cm (35 3/4 × 48 × 4 1/2 in.)
Classification
Painting
Accession number
2014.79.46
Credit line
Corcoran Collection (Gift of William Wilson Corcoran, 1869)
Time span
1851 to 1875
Department
CAB

Subjects and terms

  • painted surface
  • American
  • Acquired after publication of American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I [A-L]
  • Realist
  • Sioux
  • Ballgame
  • North American Indian
  • genre
  • Sioux Tribe
Provenance

William Wilson Corcoran [1798-1888], Washington, by 1857;[1] gift 1869 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art. [1] See Charles Lanman, _Catalogue of W. W. Corcoran's Private Gallery_ (Washington, 1857), no. 7.

Inscription

lower right: S. Eastman / 1851

NGA object ID 166499. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.