
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.