Daughters of the Chief

Additional Information

Provenance:
Private collection, Texas

Literature:
Howard Terpning: Spirit of the Plains People, Don Hedgpeth, The Greenwich Workshop, Shelton, CT, 2001: p. 88.

Howard Terpning’s action scenes and large groupings of figures are some of the most treasured in Western art, but the Arizona artist also painted numerous images of quieter scenes, including images of women and children. In Daughters of the Chief, Terpning focuses on two sisters who embrace in a reverent moment. The artist abstracted the background so viewers would be drawn instantly to the delicate faces. Terpning is often called the best painter of faces, a distinction that began in his illustration days in New York when he painted Hollywood stars for movie posters.

In Daughters of the Chief, the artist hints at a Comanche custom that was in the girls’ futures. “The Comanche People practiced polygyny, with men often marrying two or more sisters. Sisters would usually get along better together than wives from different families,” the artist writes in Howard Terpning: Spirit of the Plains People. “It was the wives who prepared the hides of buffalo killed by their husband. Buffalo hides were the Comanche’s medium of exchange in the trade for guns and whiskey with the Mexican renegades called Comancheros. The more wives a Comanche man had, the more he would have to trade. Comanche women were married young, and these two daughters of a chief would have been a matrimonial coup for any Comanche warrior.”

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