Modern Age
The Southern Cheyenne Ledger Artists (Maffet Ledger) (1860–1885)
Cheyenne Plains Ledger Drawing painters.
The Southern Cheyenne ledger artists of the Maffet Ledger are not one named artist but the makers of a bound account book filled, in the 1870s, with drawings of warriors, soldiers, horses, and honor deeds. The dates here bracket that reservation-era workshop, not a life. After the buffalo wars, Plains artists — Cheyenne, Lakota, and others — took lined ledger paper, ink, watercolor, and pencil and continued the older hide-painting art of recording coups and camp life. The Met's Maffet Ledger is a Southern Cheyenne book of that moment: outline figures on blue-ruled pages, color laid in flat, the red vertical margin still visible under a war bonnet or a horse.
Janet Catherine Berlo's Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935 set these books in the history of a documentary art made under confinement. The Met's object records identify the Maffet drawings as Southern Cheyenne work of the 1870s, public domain. Individual pages show a warrior facing a uniformed soldier, a victor walking away from fallen enemies, a lance touching a fleeing man beside a horse — the visual language of counting coup and battle, drawn by a Southern Cheyenne artist of the Maffet Ledger, not by a named sitter we can invent.
No page in this entry is signed with a personal name we can verify here. The honest attribution is collective: Southern Cheyenne ledger hands, reservation era, a people recording themselves on paper the market and the agency had introduced.
The words the record keeps using: documentary, spare, martial, lucid, urgent, first-person.
At a glance
- Lived 1860–1885
- Origin Cheyenne (Southern Cheyenne, Plains)
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Plains Ledger Drawing
- Mediums Watercolor
- Techniques Ledger drawing
Works in the archive
- Maffet Ledger drawing, 1875 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Maffet Ledger))
A Southern Cheyenne artist of the Maffet Ledger draws a confrontation: a U.S. soldier in blue, carbine across his chest, faces a warrior in a long eagle-feather bonnet who holds a saber and a bow. The weapons cross at… - Maffet Ledger drawing, 1875 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Maffet Ledger))
A Southern Cheyenne artist of the Maffet Ledger draws a warrior walking away from three fallen or wounded opponents — arrows in the back, pistols still in hand. The victor is larger, a ledger convention for the deed's… - Maffet Ledger drawing (page 72), 1875 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Maffet Ledger))
Page 72: a Southern Cheyenne artist of the Maffet Ledger draws a warrior with a feathered shield and a long lance touching a fleeing man, a horse standing to the right with quiver and bridle. The lance-touch is the…
What was said
Berlo presents Plains ledger drawing as a documentary art of 1865–1935: battle, hunt, and camp life recorded in bound books after the buffalo wars, a continuation of hide painting on introduced paper.
The Met's object records identify the Maffet Ledger as Southern Cheyenne drawings of the 1870s, watercolor and ink on ledger paper, now in the public domain.
Ledger artists used the printed rules and red margins of account books as a ground, drawing in outline and filling with watercolor — a graphic, unshaded narrative style.
What would The Southern Cheyenne Ledger Artists (Maffet Ledger) make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after The Southern Cheyenne Ledger Artists (Maffet Ledger)", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with The Southern Cheyenne Ledger Artists (Maffet Ledger) · Keep a life moment the way The Southern Cheyenne Ledger Artists (Maffet Ledger) would · Pictures made after The Southern Cheyenne Ledger Artists (Maffet Ledger)