Pictorial Hide

George Bull Child, a Southern Piikani (Blackfeet) artist, was known for his dynamic pictographic hide paintings. Born the son of Bull Child and Old Person Woman on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana in 1893, George Bull Child worked at the summer encampment near Glacier Park Lodge, the first hotel built by the Great Northern Railway in Montana. George Bull Child was instructed in Blackfeet pictorial conventions by his father, an accomplished warrior. A generation too young to go on the warpath himself, he depicted the exploits of his ancestors on pictographic war records for sale to collectors and tourists, and was also commissioned to paint presentation works for dignitaries visiting Glacier National Park. According to Blackfeet elders interviewed by curator Ramon Gonyea (Haudenosaunee) and ethnologist John Ewers, George Bull Child both recorded histories passed down orally in his community (see the Baker Massacre Robe in the collection of the Denver Art Museum, cat. no. 1985.106) and copied designs from earlier war records at display in the Great Northern hotels (see the Big Moon Robe in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, cat. no. 25/703). This practice firmly positions him as both a keeper of pictographic war art and Blackfeet oral histories at a time when his community experienced great economic and cultural stress. George Bull Child’s work is marked by an expanded colour palette which includes the liberal use of blue, red, yellow, and green alongside black and reddish-brown. Part of the first generation of reservation-born artists, George Bull Child's hide paintings bridge the gap between Blackfeet pictographic art rooted in pre-reservation warrior culture and the new socio-economic reality on the Northern Great Plains. A number of photographs and paintings of the artist were created during his lifetime.