.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Pierre Rindisbacher took his family from their native Switzerland to Lord Selkirk's Red River colony in North Western Canada in 1821. The Rindisbachers, along with fifty-six other Swiss families, had signed up as recruits to work in the Red River Valley, a part of Rupert's Land granted to Lord Selkirk by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1811 and intended to be colonised by dispossessed Scottish peasants. Trained briefly in Switzerland by the Bernese miniaturist view painter Jakob Samuel Weibel, the young Peter Rindisbacher supported his family by painting scenes of prairie life. His finely detailed small sheets describing the settlers and aboriginal population (which he sold to Hudson's Bay Company officials and others) share the precision and small format of Weibel’s Swiss views. A series of early views from his sketches 'taken by a gentleman on the spot' were lithographed and published in London in 1823-24. After several disastrous floods and crop failures, the settlers of the Red River colony abandoned their settlement in 1826. Rindisbacher and his family moved south to farm the Gratiot settlement, in what is now the western end of the Illinois and Wisconsin border. Here Rindisbacher again attracted attention for his depictions of the local Indians and his miniature portraits of fellow settlers. The artist spent the remainder of his short life in Saint Louis where he moved in 1829 and opened a studio advertising, "Miniature & Landscape Paintings, on the most reasonable terms."
The Métis of the Red River hunted the American bison (or 'buffalo') twice a year, in the summer and autumn months, until the animals were close to extinction in the late 1870s. Three years following Rindisbacher's death in 1834, a colour lithograph of his painting Hunting the Buffalo became the frontispiece for the first volume of the folio edition of The Indian Tribes of North America, with Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chief, a three-volume collection of large plates of Indian paintings, published in Philadelphia by Edward C. Biddle for Thomas L. McKinney and James Hall. This publication secured the artist's status as a pioneer recorder of a vanishing way of life on the American frontier. His work is now remembered for providing 'some of the most ethnographically accurate pictorial records of the native peoples of the Subarctic and the Northern Great Plains.' (P. Trenton and P.T. Houlihan, Native Americans, New York, 1989, p.71).
The Métis of the Red River hunted the American bison (or 'buffalo') twice a year, in the summer and autumn months, until the animals were close to extinction in the late 1870s. Three years following Rindisbacher's death in 1834, a colour lithograph of his painting Hunting the Buffalo became the frontispiece for the first volume of the folio edition of The Indian Tribes of North America, with Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chief, a three-volume collection of large plates of Indian paintings, published in Philadelphia by Edward C. Biddle for Thomas L. McKinney and James Hall. This publication secured the artist's status as a pioneer recorder of a vanishing way of life on the American frontier. His work is now remembered for providing 'some of the most ethnographically accurate pictorial records of the native peoples of the Subarctic and the Northern Great Plains.' (P. Trenton and P.T. Houlihan, Native Americans, New York, 1989, p.71).