Peter Rindisbacher

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Peter Rindisbacher (12 April 1806 – 12 August or 13 August 1834) was a North American artist who specialized in watercolors and illustrations dealing with First Nation tribes and Western Canada and the United States.

Rindisbacher emigrated from Switzerland to western Canada with his family when he was fifteen. The family joined the Red River Colony established by the Earl of Selkirk, located near present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba. Lord Selkirk's land grant, called Assiniboia, was administered by a governor and council but, as all the colony's officials had connections with the Hudson's Bay Company, the colony was effectively an arm of Hudson's Bay's operations. The colony faced difficulties due to a disastrous flood of the Red River, on the eastern boundary of North Dakota, which led to damaged crops and starvation. The Rindisbacher family relocated to Wisconsin in 1826, and then settled permanently in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1829.

From the time he was a teenager until his death at age 28, Rindisbacher was a producing artist. He began working with charcoal as a young boy, with the encouragement of his father, and received one year of formal training as an artist in Switzerland. He executed sketches and watercolors of Indians and animals in north-central Canada and the midwestern United States, including the Chippewa and Metis people living along the Red River. As an adult, Rindisbacher established an artist's studio in St. Louis, where he also produced illustrations for magazines and book covers. Famous works include:

  • The Buffalo Hunt [1] - circa 1822-24.
  • Inside of a Skin Tent [2]- 1824, one of the earliest studies of a tipi by a non-Indian. Library and Archives Canada Collection.
  • Indian hunters pursuing buffalo in the early spring [3]- 1822, painted when the artist was age sixteen.
  • Hunting the Buffalo [4]- 1836, frontispiece for Volume 1 of the History of the Indian Tribes of North America by Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, 1836.
  • War dance of the Sauks and Foxes [5]- 1834, frontispiece for Volume 2 of the History of the Indian Tribes of North America by by Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, 1838.
  • Chippewa mode of traveling in spring and summer [6]- 1825, West Point Museum Collection.

He is known to have produced 124 artworks, with forty currently held by Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa. Other large concentrations of Rindisbacher's paintings are found in the West Point Museum of the United States Military Academy and the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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