George Catlin's American Buffalo

On the Oklahoma prairie, Catlin witnessed a landscape blackened by millions of bison, and recorded the traditions of its indigenous people.

On one level Catlin's paintings offer an insight into 19th-century American ideas about the land and animals of the Continent. But he was also the first to champion the notion of a national park to protect the buffalo and native American people, that he portrayed so vividly in his paintings.

Many of the artist's own journal entries accompany the featured paintings; together they present a complex character, whose vision still informs much of today's ecological debate about the future of America's Great Plains.