Horses |
Horses were not indigenous neighbors of the buffalo and American Indians on the Great Plains. They arrived in the mid 1500s with Spanish explorers searching for gold.
Horses changed life rapidly and radically for most Native Americans, altering warfare, travel and migration, hunting, sports and religious practice.
In the West, the sight of wild horses and Indians riding horses captivated early artists. And although horse culture in the West ended abruptly at the turn of the 19th century, in the art of the West, the horse has become a timeless icon. |
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William de la Montagne Cary
Indians Jousting
1875
Oil on canvas, 5 3/4" x 10 5/8"
In 1861, Cary and two other New Yorkers traveled up the Missouri River, then headed further west. Cary eventually went back to New York via the Panama Canal and began a long career as a western artist. Some of his paintings were based on what he saw, but most are imaginary scenes based on historical events. He did not paint Indians as individuals, but used them to portray a way of life or tell a story.
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Deborah Butterfield
Untitled
2000
Unique bronze, 45" x 56" x 16"
Deborah Butterfield has devoted her entire career to sculpting horses. She uses mud and organic fibers in the works. In addition, she includes what she calls "junk" -- items like rusting wire, corrugated metal, chicken wire, and wood fencing.
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Cyrus Dallin
On the Warpath
1914
Bronze, 41 3/4" x 411/2" x 13"
After he saw Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in 1889, Dallin devoted much of his career to sculpting Indians and horses. His artistic interests were diverse, but he remains best known for his stylized, formal sculptures of Indians and Indian life. On the Warpath was cast in several sizes.
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George Catlin
Breaking Down the Wild Horse
1830s
Oil on canvas, 26" x 32"
Catlin traveled throughout the West, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, to create the most complete record ever of Native peoples. He tended to exaggerate features of his subjects. For instance, he painted landscapes in unnatural greens. These reflected his romantic view of the West as "the great and almost boundless garden spot of the earth, over whose green enamelled fields... Nature's proudest, noblest men have pranced on their wild horses."
-- George Catlin, in Treuttner, The Natural Man Observed, George Catlin's Indian Gallery, 1979
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Alfred Jacob Miller
Crow Chief on the Lookout
1840
Oil on canvas, 11 1/2" x 9 3/4"
A magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies... The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world... in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe.
-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick or The Whale, 1851.
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Frederic Remington
The Cheyenne
1901
Bronze (ed. 40),
19 3/4" x 23 1/2 x 9"
Primarily an illustrator, Frederic Remington began making sculpture late in his career. He wished to express his "natural desire to say something in the round as well as in the flat. Sculpture is the most perfect expression of action."
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Carl F. Wimar
On the Warpath
1860
Oil on canvas, 6 1/2" x 9 3/8"
Carl F. Wimar immigrated to St. Louis from Germany in 1843. After attending Dusseldorf Academy in Germany in the early 1850s, Wimar traveled up the Missouri River and sketched actively. Wimar's painting became a model for similar paintings and Hollywood westerns.
Campbell, Suzan and Kathleen Ash-Milby. The American West: People, Places and Ideas. Santa Fe, NM: Western Edge Press, 2001, pp.151.
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Henry Francois Farny
The Sign of Peace
1908
Ooil on canvas 40 1/4" x 22 1/4"
The Indian was closer to nature than we are... His attitude was reverential... an expression of the holy things of his life... Now what can we do to help repair the damage that the white man has done? Most of it is irreparable.
-- Cyrus E. Dallin, 1931.
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Cyrus E. Dallin
Appeal to the Great Spirit
Plaster mode
Cyrus Dallin was born to pioneer parents in the Utah Territory in 1861. Dallin's interest in sculpture evolved from a strike of white clay in his father's mine. Dallin initially sculpted portrait heads. Through the support of local patrons, Dallin later studied in the East and in Paris. In 1889, after attending Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in Paris, Dallin became interested in horses as subjects. He remains well known for his images of horses, Indians, and Indian life. Appeal to the great Spirit was the last of four equestrian monuments he sculpted. This sculpture, considered one of the "most profoundly stirring sculptures" in the country, was so popular that numerous replicas were produced in three different sizes.
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Carm Little Turtle
Iron Horse
1990/2000
Sepia toned print with oils, 8 1/2" x 12 1/2
In today's West, most "horses" power automobiles, and it is train locomotives, not animals, that are "iron horses."
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