The Last Command: Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn, by Kirk Stirnweis (2001)

The dramatic defeat of Gen. George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876 has been the subject of several paintings by major artists.  But for today, I thought we would take a look at a work by the relatively little-known, working artist Kirk Stirnweis (born 1967), The Last Command: Custer and the 7^th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn.

Stirnweis was born in Suffern, New York, and grew up in Connecticut. He would eventually move with his own family to Montana, Arizona, and then back east to New Hampshire; while keeping a foothold in Loveland, Colorado.  His father was a professional illustrator, and his mother had a background in graphics.  He drew constantly as a child, and his family would often discuss art around the home.

During his high school summers, Stirnweis would draw and paint at the nearby Silvermine Artist Guild. During the same period he studied anatomy with a retired surgeon, taking one of the doctor’s first classes working with professional artists. Stirnweis was taught to master composition by copying the works of the Great Masters, and was encouraged to go into illustration to hone his skills to a professional level.

Kirk was educated at several different schools studying marine biology and medicine, holding degrees in radiologic sciences and Medical imaging. But his scientific studies did not keep him from art: immediately after high school he did illustration for Field& Stream, Harlequin Romance Novels and Leisure Books, and the Danbury Mint. 

Stirnweis says, For the past 20 years I have been painting and sculpting western/historical subjects, mostly Native Americans, mountain men, prairie women, land and seascapes nautical subjects and wildlife of all kinds. Out of the blue I was commissioned to paint Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Big Horn; a daunting task. To complicate matters I had virtually no knowledge of U.S. cavalry at the time and only scant knowledge of the battle. After months of intensive research, hours spent with experts on the subject and several visits to the battlefield; I started painting. Three months later I completed The Last Command. The homework was exhaustive but well worth it, the painting had reaped the distinction of being written up by a West Point graduate and historian as: “The most accurate depiction of the Custer Battle EVER!” An enlarged Copy of the painting now hangs in the renovated Museum of Military History in KS. Subsequently, I was invited to the 125th anniversary of the Little Big Horn Battle, where I met with Native American Veterans of Foreign Wars and Chiefs of the Crow Nation. They expressed their appreciation for the noble way that I depict their culture in my paintings and sculpture.

This is quite a dramatic painting, despite some rather telling flaws.  While Stirnweis has a great gift for painting dramatic faces, the figures all seem to inhabit different pictures, rather than act as an integrated group.  Indeed, in some figures, it seems as if they have no lower body whatsoever.  (Where is the rest of the bugler and his horse?)  Also under-realized are the two fallen horses, one on the left and the other, right.  Neither seem to fully inhabit the picture, and it looks like Stirnweis relied too heavily on tall grass to address issues of foreshortening.

But Stirnweis’ failings are solely those of technique: in terms of drama and composition, he performs admirably.  The gentle rise of the mountain allows the eye to read the frame from the fighters on the left, through the main action on the rise, and then scan back left (to the beginning) by following the trajectory of the arrows.  Stirnweis also uses the empty bask spaces of the West to heightened effect:  aside from another regiment battling in the distance, these men are alone and vulnerable.

Stirnweis also amps the drama by depicting many of the men already wounded or injured, but continuing to fight on.  The look of steely determination on the faces of the small knot of five men dead center of the picture tells the entire story. 

This is an admirable addition to the iconography of Little Bighorn.

Waiting and Mad, by Charles Marion Russell (1899)

We finish our brief look into the internal workings of the mind of Charlie Russell, Cowboy Artist Extraordinaire, with this witty and wonderful picture, Waiting and Mad (1899).

People who have known Your Correspondent for some time have surely heard me say, “I’ve been married for 26 years and I’ve spent 23 of them waiting.”  As someone who regularly waits by the door, waits by the shower and waits in the car while my Much Better Half does whatever it is that he’s doing, the feeling in this picture is very familiar.  And I’m sure the look on my face is much the same.

Just to be upfront about it – I love this picture.   Though Charlie was merely a capable draughtsman of the human form, every detail of this picture speaks volumes.

The story is clear from the surroundings and the look of … sultry disgust on the Indian woman’s face.  Here is a beautiful and sexualized woman – notice the nearly exposed breast and the provocative curve of hip.  Her pallet is ready for company, but the fire in the foreground has grown cold (a witty joke), the dinner bowl is now empty, and the long pipe is cast aside and unused (ditto).  Like the wispy smoke from the dead fire, there is only a dissipating trace of something that was once hot.

Most delicious of all is the look on her face: a mixture of disappointment, fury, resignation and bored familiarity.  One has the distinct impression that this has happened before, and will probably happen again in the future.  And she knows it.

So … why do I like this painting so much?  Mainly because Charlie’s views on humanity were much smarter and commonsensical than the ways we are taught to think today.  Charlie knew many Native Americans in his time in the West, and genuinely liked them.  He was one of nature’s democrats – he judged people as individuals, and knew that, as groups, people are more alike than they are different.

Today, we are taught that our differences matter more than our similarities, and that our cultural peculiarities are some sacred carapace that protect us from being more like one another.  Charlie would’ve thought we were crazy (and I’m with Charlie).  This picture works so well because Charlie was able to capture the look of everyone who has ever waited for their wife or husband to show up.  It would be the same picture if the woman was in an Asian setting, or a Middle-European one, or in a contemporary American home: and that is Charlie’s point.  We’re all people, and we’re all more alike than we are different.

Charlies notions don’t have much currency in today’s world, but how much of commonsense does, nowadays?

Next week: New and Noteworthy Books  

Loops and Swift Horses are Surer Than Lead, by Charles Marion Russell (1916)

Here is a wonderful action painting by our friend, Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the Cowboy Artist.  Charlie is a good saddle pal to us here at The Jade Sphinx, and Your Correspondent has been trying to get a sense of the man and his philosophy through his pictures. 

We can start with the obvious: the title of this work, Loops and Swift Horses are Surer Than Lead.  In the survey of Western Art we have done here over the years, we have had occasion to look at several pictures that include bears in an attitude of menace.  In fact, after Native Americans, bandits and over-zealous lawmen, perhaps the bear is the most frequently represented foeman in Western Art.

However, most any of Charlie’s contemporaries would take the obvious route, and paint a picture of Western figures shooting and killing the bear.  (Or, reaching for their rifles to do so, or putting them down after they have done so.)  Not Charlie.  His cowboy heroes, though obviously well-armed, rope and scare the bear away to safer climes.  Always more Roy Rogers than Clint Eastwood, Charlie didn’t see the West as a vast panorama of hardship and cruelty, but, rather, a boyish paradise of freedom and fun.

This is where Charlie differs most significantly from the artist frequently associated with him, Frederic Remington (1861-1909).  For Remington, the West was unending hardship, merciless desert and physical exertion, a battle for survival to be won or lost.  It is Remington, of course, who created in his work the now-familiar Western trope of the bleached steer skull that can still be seen in countless depictions of the West.  Make a wrong move, Remington implied, and you’ll end up the same.

If this picture is any indication, perhaps Charlie’s vision was the truer one.  Loops and Swift Horses now hangs in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and is based on a true-life incident.  This painting came about by way of his friends, the Coburn brothers of the famous Circle C Ranch in eastern Montana, where they described the roping of a giant brown bear. Artistic license was taken when Charlie turned the bruin into a Grizzly, but the rest of the story was true right down to the landscape in the background: the scenic Coburn Buttes.

The dominant color of the picture is blue, but Charlie manages to mute or pop shades of it to represent everything from trees to sky to mountains, to foreground scrub.  Yes, the color never becomes monotonous or gimmicky. 

Charlie was also the master of figures in motion.  His horses move.  Many of our greatest artists have been able to depict horses of majesty, of size, of monumentality, but Charlie’s horses are seen in dramatic action, twisting or jumping with a febrile life of their own.  I can think of no finer painter of American horses than Charlie Russell

Finally, Charlie underscores the tumultuous action of the picture with a rainstorm in the middle-distant horizon.  Like all Western landscape pictures, the view-horizon is vast, going on for miles.  Thus the far-off rain storm underscores the ‘storm’ of action going on between cowboys, horses and bear. 

Speaking of movement, take a moment to look at the bear.  It twists and pivots on unsteady ground … you can almost feel the weight of the animal as it is pulled and slides down the natural incline.  The cowboys, too, move as if in motion, alternately pulling or swinging their lariats.  And notice the cowboy on the right, looking over his right shoulder, with right leg raised as counter weight to keep in saddle.

This is a really good picture, and something mysteriously akin to the essence of Charlie – not only is his West a world of action, freedom and camaraderie, but it can be a fairly bloodless one, too.  Charlie loved the animals he found out West (when visiting cities, he always went to the local zoo, where he said he felt most at home), and it’s not surprising that he would depict his heroes scaring away the threat of a grizzly, rather than killing it. 

Perhaps we should all take a page from Russell’s notebook, and produce work that preserves the best parts of ourselves (or, at least, the myth of the best part of ourselves).  The more I look at Charlie’s work, the more convinced I become that we need more artists like him now.

Laugh Kills Lonesome, by Charles Marion Russell (1925)

It’s no secret that we here at The Jade Sphinx love the work of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  The boyish Russell went West in his early youth, and worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn't seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all he wanted and he was happy.

Charlie not only loved life, he loved his life.  He wanted to be a cowboy in his earliest boyhood, and went West as soon a he had the chance. 

Charlie’s vision of the West was a boyish one, full of endless prairies and freedom.  His was an eternal boyhood – both promise and nostalgia at the same time.  The West (and his boyhood) became to him a Lost Eden which he missed and to which he could never return.

The sense of loss, though, was not a bitter nor astringent one.  In fact, it grew into some of a sweet wistfulness.  Charlie was too happy a man – too content with life and his place in it – to allow loss to play to great a part.  It’s a lesson we can all take from this maddeningly simple yet complex man.  The more I read about Charlie, the more I think I know him, the more I feel some vital core essence of the man is slipping through my fingers.

This week, we will look at three of Charlie’s pictures.  (I only think of him as “Charlie,” it’s almost impossible to think of him under his full moniker.)  They are not necessarily his best (nor most representative pictures), but they illustrate something of his philosophy, I think.

Exhibit A: Laugh Kills Lonesome, painted in 1925 and now in the Mackay Collection in Helena, Montana.  It was painted just a year before Charlie went to the Last Roundup, and if ever an artist painted an end-of-life farewell, it is this.

Charlie paints the figures in a markedly sketchy manner: it’s not verisimilitude he is after, but mood.  The sky and surrounding landscape are simply laid out in muted, cool colors.  The moon shines brilliantly in the distance, and the stars seem almost heavenly, but they do no wash the picture with cool light – they are distant and fairly unobtainable.

The realm warmth of the picture comes from the campfire, which brings a warm glow to the chuck wagon, a few simple tools, and the cowboys themselves.  There is nothing of particularly high mark in their attitudes or actions; it is simply a group of men content after a hard life of labor, loving the outdoors, their lives, and one another.  One of them smokes a contemplative cigarette, another pours the last of the coffee, and two of them share a game of cards.

But the arresting figure is the man standing on the right, hat back, coat open, body receptive to capture the campfire’s warmth.  Who is it but our old friend, Charlie Russell, the Cowboy Artist.  We have seen in the past that Charlie was not averse to putting himself into his own work, and there he is, holding his lariat, smoking a cigarette, and perhaps looking at the fire die down as his own life draws to a close.

Charlie was in ill health for the final years of his life, and he is evidently looking at his own past in this painting.  But it is not a look of regret or of loss; if anything, it’s a look of satisfaction.

Perhaps the truest nugget of the real Charlie Russell can be found in the picture’s title:  Laugh Kills Lonesome.

There, in a nutshell, is the essence of Charlie Russell.

Sketches of Marvin Franklin

Some artists are indefatigable sketchers.  Once such example was the late, great Marvin Franklin, a working artist in every sense of the term.

Franklin worked two jobs.  At night, he worked on the New York City subway system, fixing the tracks.  By day, he would work on his art – drawing, painting, and attending classes at the Arts Students League.  And for good measure, he volunteered two days a week at a homeless shelter, volunteered one day a week at his church helping young kids, and taught art classes to teens in the Bronx.  Franklin was clearly a man of remarkable energy and significant artistic curiosity.

Franklin lived with a sketchbook in his hand.  He always carried an 11x14 sketchbook, and usually used a simple ballpoint pen.  Franklin thought the pen was the ideal tool to hasten his artistic development; he thought it made the artist look more closely and draw more carefully since erasure was impossible.  He also thought ballpoint pens were resilient, compact, handy and ubiquitous. 

I don’t know how the many impromptu models felt when Franklin sketched them, but I’m sure it helped that he was over six feet tall and weighed some 230 pounds.  Franklin would fill an entire spiral sketchbook every week or two; his pen seldom left the surface of the paper. 

On April 29, 2007, Franklin, then 55, was carrying a piece of equipment across the tracks at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Downtown Brooklyn when he was struck and killed by a G train. He left behind a wife, three grown children, and hundreds of sketch pads, watercolors and etchings. Many of his works depicted subway riders and, often, homeless people.

Franklin came to his empathy for the homeless through direct experience:  he was homeless once himself for about a year, and said that the discipline of art helped him put his life into order.  Upon his passing, the New York Transit Museum curated a show of his most significant work.

Even the most cursory look would reveal the Franklin was an acute observer of humanity, and that he sketched with a remarkable fluidity and sense of detail.  Though his sketchbooks were not home to finished drawings, the images he created had a vitality often missing from more academic work. 

What would have happened to Franklin had he lived longer?  That will be forever unknown to us; he seemed to live for his art, but did not dream of artistic fame.  His ambitions (and passions) were more down-to-earth; to Franklin making great art was not more important than being a good man. 

I had not the pleasure of meeting Franklin, though his legend at the Arts Students League looms large.  I would’ve been delighted, I’m sure, to call him a friend.

The Artist’s Sketchbook: Civil War Sketches In the Becker Collection

Sketch From the Becker Collection, copyright The Becker Collection

Few places and conditions on the earth are less involved in art or creation than the battlefield.  In the field of fire, destruction, not creation, is the name of the game.  But in the pre-photography days, sketches were often the most efficient way of documenting man’s inhumanity to man.

These thoughts came to mind while paging through some of the sketches in the Becker Collection, which currently reside in Boston.  The Becker Collection consists of more than 650 sketches, and is the largest private collection of Civil War drawings, and is second only to the collection of the Library of Congress.  Artist Joseph Becker (1841-1910) was an artist-reporter in the mid-19^th century for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.  Becker and other artist-reporters satisfied the public’s appetite for images of the war as it progressed, sending eyewitness accounts on all facets of military life.

Photography at the time was often staged, or capable of recording quiet and at-peace moments.  These sketches were not the finished works that would appear in print; rather, they were preparatory sketches to keep perspective, scope and incident in mind when Becker and a cadre of other artists would make finished drawings.

Becker was born in Pottsville, PA.  He started at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper as an errand boy.  He had no formal training in art, but newspaper staff encouraged his raw talent, and in 1863, Leslie sent Becker to accompany the Union Army and make drawings.  When not sketching the battlefield, Becker recorded scenes of daily life in the army camps.

The Becker Collection travels often, and they have orchestrated many outstanding retrospectives.  If it travels to your city or town, it comes highly recommended.

Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe by Daniel Hoffman (1972)

Many readers are put off from Poe by the décor of his writings – the setting of his tales and poems, the often grotesque style of his prose, what Aldous Huxley object to as the vulgarity of his verse.  His excrescent Gothic conventions which are often on the verge, if not over the verge, of self-parody, seem willfully remote from any possible reality.  It is, however, a function of Poe’s theories of both poetry and fiction that so many mannerisms be interposed between reality and the reader.  It is my hope, in writing sometimes personally about one reader’s relationship to Poe’s work, to suggest how Poe’s artifices – the images and patters in his Arabesques, the strange diction of his poems and tales – are intensifications of the realities they seem to avoid.  Poe has exerted a force upon later readers and writers quite disproportionate to the weight of his slender stock of verses and the brevity of his tales.  Although the characters in his tales are without exception fantastic personages, they must touch some deep, responsive nerve hidden in ourselves.  Whose image do we see in Poe’s insane criminals, in his detectives with their superhuman intelligence, in his protagonists driven by mysterious obsessions or passively suffering equally mysterious adventures?  As Thoreau replies to a correspondent who complained about Whitman’s animality, of whose experiences has he the power to remind us?

Quite excellent, and taken from one of the most idiosyncratic – if not the most idiosyncratic – book on Poe, poet Daniel Hoffman’s odd Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, first published in 1972.

If the French believe it’s essential to send a thief to catch a thief, it is probably fitting that we send a poet to root out another one.  Hoffman (1923-2013) was a poet, essayist and academic, serving a term as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1973).

Born in New York, Hoffman was a World War II veteran, and a graduate of Columbia (B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.).  He wrote several volumes of poetry and criticism, and despite holding many public positions (he was Poet in Resident at the Cathedral of St. John the Devine, for example), he is perhaps best known for his study of Poe.

To be sure, Poe⁷ is a very strange book.  Hoffman set out to write a book about Poe in much the same manner Poe would have written it.  This leads to a sometimes labyrinthine syntax, a love for emphasis, and a heavily-applied layer of subtext (and sub-subtext).  It is not to everyone’s taste, but if you are interested in Poe, Hoffman’s book is essential.

Hoffman makes the point throughout that we never quite get our hands around the totality of Poe; that once we think we have wrung him dry of layers of meaning and importance, more come to light.  I first came to Poe thought my keen interest in the Gothic, then found that – despite the gloom – that he had much in common with the aesthetes.  What is his figure of Roderick Usher, for example, other than that of an aesthete who finds his highest artistic fulfillment in decadent art?  All artists speak in the language that means the most to them, and Poe’s taste for Gothic tropes and wildly Romantic characters does not mean his art is any the less subtle, layered or significant.

I had revisited Hoffman’s book recently when reading about Poe in the news.  Hoffman goes into great detail on Poe’s inductive reasoning regarding the origin of the cosmos and our place within them, as outlined in the prose-poem Eureka.  Hoffman wrote his book in 1972, yet here is author Marilynne Robinson writing about Poe and Eureka in the New York Review of Books this past February:

Poe’s mind was by no means commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.

Writing on the Scientific American blog, writer scientist John Horgan responds to Robinson with: Now that is a theory of everything. But it isn't "sound," it's batshit crazy—in a good way.

Like Hoffman, I don’t think we will ever be through with Poe, nor will we completely understand him.  His mind was too subtle (the melodrama of his plots and prose notwithstanding), his science too colored by aesthetics, his aesthetics too colored by his deductive and inductive reasoning, his true sense of beauty too tinged with melancholy and sadness.  Poe remains one of the few great writers who was, at heart, a fairly miserable man – a walking anomaly, a personality divided.  A man who saw horrors and sorrow everywhere, and yet dreamed of beauty.

Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s In the Pan, by Charles Marion Russell (1915)

Here it is, a New Year, and already we at The Jade Sphinx are thinking about the past.  To be exact, the past that makes up our great American Western Myth.  We spent the holiday season happily listening to Christmas carols, reading some of our favorite seasonal texts, and, of course … thinking about Westerns.

You mean you didn’t?

This Christmas we made our way through more of the Zane Grey (1872-1939), corpus, reading more of the letters of cowboy artist Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), watching a western with both (and I kid you not!) Ronald Colman (1891-1958) and Gary Cooper (1901-1961)… and thinking about Randolph Scott (1898-1987).

We will look at all of these this week, but let’s open with a droll evocation of where winter is heading this year with Russell’s wry and wonderful Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s in the Pan, painted in 1915.  The work is oil on canvas, mounted on Masonite, and it currently resides in the Gilcrease Museum of Tulsa, OK.

It’s no secret that we here at The Jade Sphinx love the work of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  The boyish Russell went West in his early youth, and worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn't seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all Charlie wanted and he was happy.

Charlie spent his artistic life drawing and painting the West that loomed so large in his personal myth.  This delightful picture from 1915 is Charlie at his puckish best.  A man of expansive, genial good humor and a delight in a good joke, Charlie was not immune to including humor in his work.  Indeed, humor is one of the integral human experiences, and any aesthete is bereft if he does not fully embrace the lighter side of life.

Clearly our cowboy has done some winter hunting, but he was just a little too close to the edge of a gorge.  He’s bagged his meat, but how will he get it from the outcropping on which it fell?  Aside from the simple narrative of the painting, there is the sound emotional tenor of the work, which is … yeah, I’ve had days like that.

It was part of Charlie’s genius to set the work in the dead of winter; it would not nearly be as witty as a picture depicting a summer scene.  The cold, the snow and the barren quality of the landscape all conspire to make the hunter’s challenge all the more grueling.

Again, let’s look at Charlie’s simple mastery of the medium.  The dominant color is blue, but … look at what he does with it.  Various shades of blue depict everything from cavernous depths, stony distances, cloudy skies, ice on the precipice, and the snow itself.  There are even hints of blue in the rifle-barrel and upon the lighter-colored horse.  Such versatility of shade, warmth and cold, and gradation of a single color is remarkable.

Charlie is also a master of body language.  The vexation of the hunter is comically rendered without being over-the-top; the horses merely indifferent or simply miserable at being out in the weather.

Look at the circle formed by the horse’s nose pointing at the hunter, the gun butt pointing at the ram, the ram pointing to the scrub, pointing back at the horses.  Charlie’s sense of composition was unerring.

It is astonishing that a painting that so deals with death can also be so light-hearted.  Charlie creates a pyramid shape to draw attention to his hunter by having a dead steer create the left foundation, and a tangled mass of withered scrub form the right.  But it is never gloomy or dour; in fact, it only calls to mind the quote by Mark Twain, who wrote, life is just one damn thing after another.

Tomorrow: Zane Grey!

The Art of Alfredo Rodríguez, Part III: A Golden Moment (2013)

We conclude our look at Alfredo Rodríguez (born 1954) with this, A Golden Moment, painted just one year ago.

Though the last two pictures we looked at were of American Indians, Rodríguez spends nearly as much time painting miners, prospectors and Wild West bad men.  He also paints children of the plains, as well as Mexican and Indian women in a manner that could only be called Sanitized Cheesecake.

Rodríguez is a conundrum – a painter of undeniable skill and talent, but without any taste or point of view.  He too often relies on pyrotechnics to achieve his effects, and short-changes his own considerable abilities.

Today’s picture is certainly not Rodríguez at his best; though correct enough in its component parts, they don’t seem to fit together in any real way.  The prospector is wonderfully drawn, but there is no real sense of his weight or bulk upon the rocks.  The gun in his belt looks more like something drawn on his shirt than a real weapon, and I’m not quite sure where the back of the man’s body is hiding.

More egregious is the dog, who looks like he was stenciled onto the background, like one of those sets we got as children where we rubbed figures into pre-painted pictures.  The poor hound seems to hang there, not really in this picture at all, and obediently looking off to the side to see if its time to get out of it. 

How can this happen?  Again – look at the man, divorced from the rest of the picture.  Or, better yet, look at the pickaxe, bucket and pan.  All are executed with a sure hand; even the dog -- the component of the picture that screams “kitsch” with bruised lungs – is competently done.  It’s just that all of these pieces look like they were stitched together, a painting more Frankenstein than Buffalo Bill.

Alfredo Rodríguez clearly wants to be a modern Charles Marion Russell or Frederic Remington; but his passion is commercial, not personal.

The Art of Alfredo Rodríguez, Part II: American Indian

We are spending this week looking at the work of Mexican-born artist Alfredo Rodríguez (born 1954), who currently lives in California. 

Rodríguez, like many of his generation, grew up to be obsessed with the American West.  It’s important to remember that though Westerns are few and far between today, that the 1950s and 1960s were a boom time for Western films and television shows; comedian Bob Hope once quipped that NBC meant “Nothing But Cowboys.”  While a boy growing up in Mexico, Rodríguez got a steady diet of American television Westerns playing in reruns.  Like many of his generation, he was marked for life.

Rodríguez’s work has been covered in such books as Western Painting Today by Royal B. Hassick,  and Contemporary Western Artists by Peggy and Harold Samuels; he has also been covered ins such magazines as Art of the West, Western Horseman, and International Fine Art Collector. He has illustrated textbooks and histories, as well, and the prolific artist is one of the most successful contemporary painters in the Western genre.

We at The Jade Sphinx wax and wane on our admiration for Rodríguez.  His efforts to keep the American West alive are met here with riotous applause.  So, too, are his abilities as an artist.  We just wish he had better taste.

Today’s picture is a case in point.  It is quite striking – Rodríguez’s skill at drawing is in full display here.  Look at the network of fine lines etched into the subject’s face, let alone the shadow of his long hair playing against his cheek.  More impressive still are the feathers atop his head, created with such complete control of line and contour as to be surprisingly lifelike.

His sense of coloration is more subdued here than yesterday’s picture – though the dramatic sky, dotted with clouds and merging into the wooded background is perhaps a bit too calculated.  And there, in short, is our problem with the work.  This is a picture calculated to its every brushstroke.  Not that all great pictures are not planned – that’s not exactly what we mean here.  Instead, it seems as if Rodríguez were checking off a list of tropes necessary or expected for this type of picture, and delivering them without comment or insight.

Is our Indian stoic and insightful?  Check.  Brilliant blue sky and wide-open spaces?  Check and check.  Peaceful village rendered in desert colors?  Check.  Water, grass and teepees?  Check, check, check.  It’s not that there’s anything wrong with this picture – it is actually quite splendidly done – it’s just that there is little-to-no point of view and composed by route.  One cannot help but wish that Rodríguez harnessed that remarkable technical ability into a more personal statement on the West.

It makes a superb cover for a paperback Western; as a finished work of art that stands alone on its ability to move us, it falls short.

More Rodríguez tomorrow!

The Art of Alfredo Rodríguez, Part I: Profile of a Chief (2006)

This past week, we were lucky enough to entertain a dear friend who is also deeply devoted to the arts.  We were talking about the art world in general and The Jade Sphinx in particular when he opined, “you know, you may want to write about artists who are still alive every now and then.”

Astonishing thought…

At the same time, I had been reading S. C. Gwynne’s masterful Empire of the Summer Moon, a look at the Comanches, who were at one time most powerful Indian tribe in American history.  (Expect more on this book, later – it is magnificent.)  And that called to mind the paintings of Alfredo Rodríguez (born 1954).

Rodríguez started drawing and painting in his earliest boyhood; it was as natural to him as learning to walk or speak.  He was born in Mexico, and grew up fascinated by stories of the American West.  The West of his imagination is peopled with strong, colorful Indians, prospectors, homesteaders, and miners.  His pictures have been corralled by private collectors and several corporations, and he currently exhibits at numerous invitational art shows around the country, including the Masters of the American West at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, as well as in the Heritage Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, The West Lives On Gallery in Jackson, Wyoming, and the Art Pacific Gallery in Wailea, Hawaii. Collectors include the late Gene Autry, actress Connie Stevens, and Pilar Wayne (widow of actor John Wayne).

Rodríguez became a professional artist 1968 and made a steady career of magazine illustration before moving into fine art painting.  He has been a remarkably prolific painter, and his oeuvre varies remarkably in quality.  There are works that have a striking, stark declarative power – here is the past as I see it, peopled by remarkable giants now long gone.  Other pictures, particularly those involving children or family scenes, are sentimental and soft … bordering dangerously on kitsch.  Like many painters who have had to make a living in the extremely competitive field of magazine illustration, Rodríguez often panders rather than paints.  However, when Rodríguez is at the top of his game, he is quite something.

Today’s painting, Profile of a Chief (2006), exemplifies all that is great and questionable in Rodríguez’s work.  The technical aspects of Rodríguez’s work here are quite wonderful: notice, the superb draughtsmanship in the depiction of the face, or, better yet, the brushwork that not only delineates the lines of various feathers, but moves them in-and-out of shafts of light.  Though the visible hand has aged into a claw, the deep lines in the knuckles and stained thumbnail are clearly visible.  The beadwork is rendered with loving detail, and the fringe of his buckskin has a wonderfully tactile quality.

And yet … and yet, Rodríguez becomes the victim of his own desire to please.  The coloration of the picture, though striking, is simply too … much.  It is if Rodríguez almost did not trust his own considerable talent enough, and felt the need to overcompensate, to dazzle with color to hide any possible defects in the drawing.  Many contemporary painters are guilty of this – extremely talented men and women who, without the long tradition of atelier training to provide confidence and context, default to excess to guarantee success. 

For all of its excesses, though, Profile of a Chief is a well-executed picture.

More Rodríguez tomorrow!

Jacob Collins at the Dahesh

This season’s batch of Salon Thursday lectures, created and hosted with customary aplomb by the Dahesh, continued on a high note last night when Jacob Collins -- New York City artist, teacher, and founder of the Grand Central Academy – came to discuss the foundation of his contemporary art school, patterned on the model of the 19th-century atelier. 

My long-standing admiration for Collins as an artist, an arts activist and a teacher is without bounds.  He has been at the forefront of a strong, pervasive and ever-growing movement to correct the course that art (and art history) has taken after its disastrous, dehumanizing collision with Modernism.  For Collins (like your correspondent and millions of others in an invisible majority), the break from the Academy was not an explosion of new freedoms, but an invitation to hollow, ridiculous and often offensive amateurism and self-indulgence. 

Aside from the beauty of his work, Collins also joins such diverse figures as Graydon Parrish, Ted Seth Jacobs, Anthony Ryder and Ephraim Rubenstein as an important teacher to new generations of artists who aspire to virtuosity.

Collins spoke to a packed house last night (April 3), in a relaxed and conversational forum.  After telling us about himself and his mission to rescue art from Modernist muddle-headedness, he opened the floor for questions, charming the crowd for more than an hour.  Any man who says, unashamedly, I love stuffy, old fashioned humanism.  Many have argued that the world that I’m in is lonely, but the rest of the world that I am fleeing is moving so quickly that I cannot apprehend it is a kindred spirit to these pages.

Though not explicitly stated as such last night, what Collins is seeking is a return to a Renaissance Ideal; another Age of Enlightenment.  Modernism has robbed art of its human element, and the fundamental connection between great art and great emotion has been lost in a morass of irony, ‘theory’ and hucksterism.

As Collins said during his opening: What got me here?  As a kid in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, I grew up in a time from which I felt distanced.  Something gave me a sense of loss.  I recognized that something was missing when I looked at the work of the great Renaissance masters through the 19^th Century, which is really the Renaissance arc.

I was outraged in my youthful way by its absence, by a lack of continuity.  What happened, I wondered?  Why can’t we have that art?  And why am I discouraged by teachers and experts rom pursing that ideal in my own studies?

Of course, Collins realizes that an engagement with the past does not mean living in the past.  As he said, the problem with that is that it’s reactionary.  But there is clearly something wrong with the 20^th Century.  And that there is some cultural suppression of the humanist impulse is fairly obvious.  I’m at a point where fixing something that is wrong is a big part of my life.  That, and I want to make beautiful art.

One would think making beautiful art was part of the agenda for any art student, or any art school.  But Collins did not find that to be the case.  First, I had to learn how to draw and paint decently.  That was very hard.  Years later, I started an atelier because I kept bumping into people who wanted to do this – become part of the artistic tradition – under a coherent structure.  When I was a kid, I wanted to fix things and make them look good.  And that, in a way, is what I’m doing with the Academic Tradition.  My great ambition was to be a marvelous artist; not by contemporary standards, which I thought were false and ugly, but by the high standards of the 19^th Century.

I thought we would change the culture, which was a charming fantasy.  My goal isn’t to step into some throne of art culture, but to open up space for artists working in this tradition.  And that is slowly happening.  This culture and ideas and philosophy is more advanced than it was 20 years ago.  What is missing is the patronage, a way of having some kind of nexus with the culture.

Collins is acutely aware that the very language of the current art establishment is against him.  He says, This revival of interest seems natural in that reconnecting to drawing and painting is natural.  There is today an “institutional avant-garde,” to use a contradiction in terms, but there it is.  There is a deep, false, association of art with the notion that, as progressive politics are morally good, and regressive politics are morally bad, regressive art is bad.  It’s a cultural value that’s universally accepted – ergo, progressive art is morally good and regressive art is morally bad.

If you want to bring back that art, the argument goes, you are bringing back the culture that went with it.  If you want to go back to that type of art, then you want to go back to a culture that preceeds progressive politics … but I think that is a specious argument.  It should be, instead, couched in terms of Modernism vs. Humanism.  But Post Modernist thought rejects that because it bound to its own irony. 

The context and the language of art – so many people have created a language of art that has, built into it, a value system that is antithetical to this art.  You need to have a new language to discuss it.

How we have gotten to this impasse is also a topic that animates the artist:  The phenomenon of the last 100-150 years is unusual.  It’s like the Renaissance in reverse.  There was a “scrap that” attitude of the 20^th Century that is almost historically without precedent.  That has led to a fragmented art world.  My hope is that some patronage would evolve to support these artists and this type of art.

The question of why it happened – I’ve spent my life thinking about it.  There is a sort of taboo for people who advocate on behalf of pre-Modernist art… but, part of me feels that’s just too bad.  All I want is to collect around me people who are interested in this.  It’s a different world.  As I say, if you want to play the piccolo, and connect with people who like it, don’t spend time in heavy metal concerts.

It was an extraordinary evening with an extraordinary man: gifted artist, philosopher, and activist.  Kudos, as always, to the Dahesh for providing an ongoing forum for art scholarship and outreach.

One last brief word about The Grand Central Academy of Art.  This is the school founded by Jacob Collins, located in mid-town Manhattan.  To quote their Web site, The Grand Central Academy of Art … is built on the skills and ideas that have come from the classical world, the Italian Renaissance and through to the Beaux-Art tradition of the nineteenth century.   The Academy is a center for the revival of the classical tradition where a new generation of artists is supported in the pursuit of skill and beauty.  Interested readers can learn more at: http://grandcentralacademy.classicist.org/index.html.

When I Was a Kid (1905), by Charles Marion Russell

It’s no secret that we here at The Jade Sphinx love the work of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  The boyish Russell went West in his early youth, and worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn't seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all he wanted and he was happy.

 

Charlie’s vision of the West was that of a boy, one of endless prairies and freedom.  His was an eternal boyhood – both promise and nostalgia at the same time.  The West (and his boyhood) became to him a Lost Eden which he missed and to which he could never return.

Charlie spent the rest of his artistic life drawing and painting the West that loomed so large in his personal myth.  He often sketched himself in his wryly funny letters, and sometimes showed up in his own paintings.  This wonderful gouache picture from 1905 is Russell at his relaxed best.  The landscape and figures in the background are effectively accomplished with some broad strokes of color, while Russell reserves the full potency of his representational prowess on himself and his horse.  Russell was not an especially effective horseman in real life, and much of his boyhood West was spent sheep-herding.  But here is Russell’s youth as he saw it in his mind’s eye, with steely eye looking into the distance, rifle over saddle and ready for whatever was over the next horizon.

Remembrances of boyhood and anticipation of what’s over the next horizon hit somewhat somber notes for your correspondent this July 4^th.  Russell’s work remains a poignant reminder of what we have lost in our culture, our national spirit, and, more important, in our civil liberties. 

 

Perhaps we should all take a page from Russell’s notebook, and preserve the best parts of ourselves (or, at least, the myth of the best part of ourselves) along with the vision of the Founding Fathers as we move as bravely forward as we can.

A Pack Train, by Frederic Remington

We close our weeklong look at Frederic Remington (1861-1909) with another of his nocturnes, A Pack Train, painted in 1909 (about 36x27). 

To pick up Remington’s story, his success as a Western painter made him the darling of Western Army officers fighting in the Indian Wars.  He was often travelling with them, usually with General Nelson Miles.  Remington touted the “heroism” of the military after the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, where 150 Sioux, mostly women and children, were murdered by the U.S. Army. 

Remington continued on his frequent trips around the U.S. and Mexico, painting and writing books and articles on the West.  He wooed many celebrities and politicians – forging an important friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, for instance – but he was never able to break into the entrenched artistic establishment.  Partly this was because of his endless self-publicizing (which, for an interesting comparison, was also one of the problems with Whistler), and partly because he was viewed as a singularly difficult man (which, for an interesting comparison, was also one of the problems with most of the artists covered in The Jade Sphinx).

Remington died in 1909, the day after Christmas, following an emergency appendectomy that led to peritonitis.  It was not helped by the fact that he weighed in the neighborhood of 300 pounds and had lived a very high life.

A Pack Train is another attempt by Remington to paint nighttime scenes.  He does this by using a largely viridian palette, and contrasting larger and darker shades to make up his figures.  There is no crystal-clear delineation of the mules, packs or rider, but the overall impression is unmistakable.  Remington also masterfully captures the quality of shadows cast by moonlight – Remington’s shadows are never black, brown or gray, but shades of blue, green or purple.  He painted with both his brain and his optic nerve.

Two things are going on with this picture.  First off, the sense of how alone this man is.  The landscape around his is enormous and falls back to great distances of emptiness.  However, they sky above, also immense, is filled with stars and other points of light – life also separated by incalculable distances.

Also there is the sense of menace so often found in Remington’s work.  Though there is no clear danger depicted, the wary turn of the cowboy’s head and the sense of isolation and vulnerability in the dark is overwhelming.  Whether delivering supplies or transporting everything he owns personally, no one looking at the pictures wishes he was the driver.  Even the donkeys seem to be beaten down by care or worry.  It’s a remarkably emotional picture executed in a deceptively simple manner.

We Struck Some Boggy Ground, by Frederic Remington

Here is a stunning black and white piece by artist Frederic Remington (1861-1909), depicting an actual event some 40 years after the fact for an article he wrote about it in Harper’s Weekly.  (He did rely upon the testimony of eyewitnesses.)

Remington’s story, How the Law Got Into the Chaparral, was published in December, 1896.  In the story, Remington relates the tale as told by Texas Ranger Colonel “Rip” Ford.  John Salmon “Rip” Ford intermittently led Ranger companies against Indians throughout the 1850s and dealt with Mexican rebellion on the Rio Grande in 1859-60.  His most notable exploit was the Battle of Antelope Hills, May 12, 1858, in which Texas Rangers surprised and destroyed the Comanche village of Iron Jacket.

For a full description of the engagement, here is a passage from Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers, a magisterial history by Robert M. Utley that comes highly recommended: By March 1858, Ford was advancing toward the northwestern frontier, combing a broad swatch of country in four columns.  He felt himself too weak, however, to mount an offensive into the Comanche homeland.  The Rangers called up under the Pease administration had reached the end of their terms and were being replaced.  That left Ford with only a few more than a hundred men, including his seventy-three-year-old father.  At the Brazos Agency, however, Agent Shapley Ross solved Ford’s problem: more than a hundred Caddos, Anadarkos, Tawakonis, and Tonkawas placed themselves under Ross’s command to take the warpath with Ford’s Rangers.

Striking northwest from is base near Fort Belknap, Ford crossed Red River and bore north into the Comanche ranges west of the Wichita Mountains.  The Indian auxiliaries not only doubled Ford’s firepower but proved their worth as guides and trackers.  The Rangers were superior fighters, well drilled by Ford.  All they needed was to find the elusive Comanches, which they achieved by falling on a broad trail that led to the Canadian River opposite the landmark Antelope Hills.

Early on May 12, 1858, the Rangers and their allies splashed across the Canadian and raced headlong toward the village of the Comanche chief Iron Jacket.  The Brazos Indians took the lead, bore to the left, between the village and the river, and poured a deadly fire into surprised warriors bolting from their lodges.  Iron Jacket, brightly painted and armored in a coat of Spanish mail, mounted and charged the Brazos line.  “The sharp crack of five or six rifles brought his horse to the ground,” recalled Ford, “and in a few moments the Chief fell riddled with balls.”  The auxiliaries shot down all the Comanches attacking toward the river.  Meanwhile, in two wings the Rangers stormed into the village itself.  The fight then became a free-for-all, with knots of Rangers and their allies chasing fleeing Comanches.  Here and there warriors paused to make a stand and give their families time to escape.  But the Rangers, their six-shooters pooping, broke up every such attempt.  Shortly after noon, the winded pursuers returned to the village.  Warriors from another camp a few miles up the Canadian attempted a counterattack, but were driven off.

(Watch these pages for a review of Lone Star Justice, along with other books by master historian Robert M. Utley.)

This stunning gouache picture in grisaille measures 29.4x20, and also shows an interesting insight into Remington’s views on Indians.  In his story, Remington writes about the “screaming of the women and the children,” and in his illustration also shows how viciously outnumbered, out-gunned and out maneuvered the Indians were in this encounter.

The Rangers ride magnificent horses and brandish guns – by focusing on the rear of the animals and moving them uphill, Remington underscores their size and power.  The sheer size of the Rangers in the picture is impressive: they dwarf the Indian encampment in the background, which seems to have no martial contingent ready at-hand.

Telling, too, is the dead Indian in the foreground.  His proximity to the horses show the Indians ridden over by the tide of history.  A fascinating bit of Remingtonana.

More Remington tomorrow!

 

Fight for the Water Hole, by Frederic Remington

A copy of this picture hung on my wall when I was Public Affairs Director at Hoffmann-La Roche, which perhaps says more about the shot-‘em-dead working environment of a global pharmaceutical company than any war stories I could share.

Painted in 1903 on canvas (3' 4.13" x 27.13") and currently housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, Fight for the Water Hole is a remarkable picture.   As we said previously, Frederic Remington (1861-1909) thought of the West mostly as a place of peril, privation and as a land where heroes met (or where ploughed under by) these challenges.

To demonstrate how Remington illustrated peril, look closely at what is happening here.  The water hole is really slightly more than a miserable puddle of water – a puddle in the middle of a vast expanse of arid desert.  Five men and their horses are huddled inside, and the men hold their rifles at the ready, for protecting the water hole is their sole hope for survival.  Indians circle in the distance.  And Remington doesn’t seem to hold out much hope for cowboys: in the upper right of the picture is what seems to be one of his trademark cattle skulls, bleached white by the sun.

Remington divides the painting into broad swatches of color, putting the viewer slightly above the action.  This not only gives us a bird’s eye view of the steely-eyed westerner (who looks a bit like actor Sam Elliott), but also provides a view of the purplish mountains in the far distance.  This expanse increases the importance of the waterhole: though it is large in the painting, it is infinitesimal in the scheme of the landscape.

The long shadow on the right side of the hole does not bode well for our heroes – day is clearly waning, making them more vulnerable.  This is especially poignant given the historical moment at which it was painted: in 1903, people were distraught by the closing off of the West.  Here, not only the West but Western heroes are facing an irrecoverable end of their own.  And, in view of the recent Indian Wars, here are heroes of which we will never see the like again.

Fight for the Waterhole was published in 1903 in Collier’s Weekly as part of Remington's four-year contract with the magazine to reproduce one painting each month. This alliance encouraged Remington to experiment with his technique, and as seen here, the results included looser brushwork, refined compositions, a bolder palette, and the development of psychological qualities in his art.  The action is inspired by landscapes such as the Sierra Bonita Ranch in Arizona, and on the Buffalo Wallow Fight in the Texas Panhandle during the Indian Wars.  However, I believe Remington painted this picture while comfortably ensconced in New York.

More Remington tomorrow!

Pretty Mother of the Night, by Frederic Remington

We continue our look at Western artist Frederic Remington (1861-1909) with a picture very different from the frenetic and violent A Dash for the Timber: Pretty Mother of the Night.

Following his first commercial sales to Harper’s Weekly, Remington went to rural Peabody, Kansas, to become a sheep rancher.  He quickly found out the life in Kansas was boring, isolated and rougher than he anticipated.  An Easterner at heart, he was never really completely at home in the wilderness. His inheritance dissipated from the failed venture, Remington returned home.

His mother loaned him enough money to go to Kansas City and start a hardware business.  However, some kind of swindle (the details have never really been clear), made the business fail.  He took what money he had left and invested as half-owner in a saloon.  He also married his New York sweetheart Eva Caten and brought her to Kansas City.

Eva was as unhappy in the saloon business as Remington was in the sheep business.  In addition, she showed little interest or appreciation in his art, and left him to return to New York.  This desertion may have served as something of a wakeup call to Remington, who started to sketch and paint in earnest.

His painting created greater success for him than any of his business ventures, and he soon identified as an artist.  He returned to New York and reunited with Eva in Brooklyn.  He studied at the Art Students League in New York and improved his technique.

At this time, there was a fear in the East that the great open spaces of the West were closing down, and that the pageant of the American West was drawing to a close.  Remington was able to capitalize on that by submitting work to Harper’s Weekly and Collier’s, documenting his recent (and largely exaggerated) Western experiences.  Eastern editors took him for the genuine article, and started sending him back to the West to chronicle its final days.

Between 1885 and 1888 Remington made a number of trips to the American Southwest, principally to cover the U.S. Cavalry and its pursuit of the Apaches. He also followed the Cavalry in pursuit of the renegade Indian Geronimo.  The stark landscape and dramatic human events he encountered there greatly influenced his artistic development. Remington filled his diaries with observations, made countless field sketches, took many photographs with the latest equipment, and collected numerous artifacts to use in his paintings.

In the eternal comparisons between Remington and Charles Russell (1864-1926), one of the most interesting points is their respective feelings toward the American Indian.  Russell genuinely liked Indians – to him, they were just as much a symbol of freedom and living-in-nature as the American cowboy.  He learned the exacting sign language (he and his wife used it as both a private code and a party trick), and even camped with them for extended periods.  Though he never shied from depicting the occasional savagery of the Indian, he also reveled in his beauty, capability and stoicism.

It was an entirely different story with Remington.  Most of his interactions with the Indians were while he was covering the Indian Wars in the company of the U.S. Cavalry.  They were never anything less than the enemy – wily, unscrupulous, untrustworthy and … alien.  There are few positive depictions of the Indians in Remington’s work.  That is why Pretty Mother of the Night (oil on board) is such a remarkable picture.  Seldom has he portrayed the Indian with such a sympathetic eye.

Pretty Mother of the Night is best labeled a nocturne – its explores the technical and aesthetic difficulties of painting nighttime pictures.  (It is a feat at which Remington would excel.)  Painted around 1900, this picture was meant to serve as an illustration for a novel he had recently written called The Way of the Indian.  In the novel the hero, White Otter, addresses the moon (Pretty Mother of the Night) after successfully completing a test of manhood. 

Aside from the lack of the frenetic energy in a painting like A Dash for the Timber, look at the other things that Remington does differently.  A Dash for the Timber details man, horse and landscape with an almost photographic attention to detail.  Here, Remington uses a significant change in compositional technique.  Though beautifully rendered, the horses, Indians and landscape are all done with an almost Impressionist lack of detail. 

Also … Just look at how he poses the subjects and what he’s doing with them.  If the landscape is barren and empty, Remington underscores the hardness of the landscape by the lean, almost skeletal sparseness of the Indians.  These are not well-fed warrior princes, but, rather, people of the land barely squeezing a living from it.

Also, too, look at how he compares the barren immensity of the landscape and its two dots of life with the immensity of the heavens with its corresponding dots of light.  Remington here underscores the quiet miracle of life, both here on earth, and in the heavens.

More Remington tomorrow!