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The portrait was made in the summer of 1832 at the Mandan villages near the mouth of the Knife River in present-day North Dakota, the same villages where Lewis and Clark had wintered in 1804–1805 at Fort Mandan. Catlin had traveled up the Missouri aboard the American Fur Company steamer Yellow Stone, reaching Fort Clark and the Mandan towns in July. Four Bears sat for him there. Catlin regarded him as one of the most distinguished men he met on the upper Missouri and produced both this full-dress portrait and a second image showing him in war costume. Five years later, in 1837, the smallpox epidemic brought up the river by steamboat killed Four Bears and nearly the entire Mandan nation, giving Catlin’s 1832 portraits unintended documentary weight.

The painting belongs to Catlin’s Indian Gallery, the body of roughly 500 portraits and scenes he produced during his Missouri and Plains travels of 1830–1836 and exhibited in American and European cities through the 1840s. After decades of failed attempts to sell the collection to the U.S. government, the Gallery was donated to the Smithsonian in 1879 by the widow of Joseph Harrison, the Philadelphia industrialist who had acquired it from Catlin’s creditors. The portrait is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Together with Karl Bodmer’s 1834 drawings of the same sitter, it remains a primary visual record of Mandan leadership in the generation after Lewis and Clark.

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The portrait was made during the winter of 1833–1834 at Fort Clark, on the upper Missouri in present-day North Dakota, where Maximilian and Bodmer wintered among the Mandan and Hidatsa villages. This was the same Mandan community Lewis and Clark had visited at Fort Mandan in 1804–1805, roughly three decades earlier. Mato-Tope sat for Bodmer repeatedly and also produced his own pictographic self-portraits on paper supplied by the artist. Within four years the sitter would be dead: the smallpox epidemic of 1837 carried up the Missouri by the steamboat St. Peter killed Mato-Tope and reduced the Mandan population from roughly 1,600 to fewer than 150.

Karl Bodmer (1809–1893), a Swiss painter, was hired by Maximilian specifically to document the peoples and landscapes of the American interior. The resulting Maximilian-Bodmer expedition produced one of the most precise visual records of Plains Indian life before the epidemics and treaty era of the mid-century. The aquatints, engraved in Europe between 1834 and 1843, were issued as the atlas to Maximilian’s Reise in das innere Nord-America. The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha holds the principal Bodmer archive, acquired from the Maximilian family through the Northern Natural Gas Company in 1962. The Mato-Tope portrait is among the most reproduced images in the series and has become a standard illustration in scholarship on the upper Missouri tribes encountered by Lewis and Clark.

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