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Peter Rindisbacher was born on April 12, 1806, in Berne, Switzerland. In the summer of his twelfth year he toured the Bernese Alps and studied art with Swiss miniature painter Jacob S. Weibel. Fifteen-year-old Peter began painting the Canadian West when his family arrived at Lord Selkirk's colony on the Red River, near present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1821, more than a decade before American artist George Catlin reached the upper Missouri River country.
The trading post at the Red River settlement
bartered with Assiniboine, Ojibwa, and
Sioux peoples, all of whom are portrayed
in Rindisbacher's detailed sketches and vivid
watercolors. He was a skilled draftsman, and
his paintings are well composed. His artwork
provides an accurate record of the dress and
daily life of the Native peoples such as a Sioux
bow hunter on snowshoes pursuing a buffalo
or a Chippewa family traveling by canoe. Rindisbacher
was the first European American
artist to capture life inside a tipi, in his Scene
in an Indian Tent (ca. 1824). His best-known
work, The Murder of David Tully and Family
by the Sissatoons, a Sioux Tribe (ca. 1823.30),
chronicles the dramatic deaths of former
members of the settlement in 1823.
After barely surviving at the Red River colony
and following the destructive flood of
1826, the Rindisbacher family made their way
to Wisconsin, living there for three years before
moving to St. Louis in 1829. During the
next four years, a number of lithographs and
engravings of Rindisbacher's work appeared
in the American Turf Register and Sporting
Magazine, published in Baltimore. He died
August 15, 1834, at the age of twenty-eight of
unknown causes.
See also EUROPEAN AMERICANS:
Douglas, Thomas (Earl of Selkirk).