AUCTION 2017,

LOT 333

Unknown Artist

1919-2015

Four Feathers

MEDIUM: Oil on board

DIMENSIONS: 11 x 11 inches

Signed lower right

SOLD FOR: $38,025

Including Buyers Premium

Additional Information

Ken Riley adapted his skills as an illustrator to easel painting, developing a signature style in Western Art that owes something to classical bas-relief sculpture, Renaissance fresco, and the mural tradition. His sense of design creates a stillness, an air of legend, accentuating the drama of the moment. Riley is a crucial connection, perhaps the crucial connection, between the early masters of the West, the Golden Age of American Illustration and the contemporary Western Art scene. In a major work such as Hidatsa Tribesmen (lot 334), Riley combines elements of abstraction in the landscape, layered sky, and in the geometry of the lodges in the background with a sculpted grouping of figures in varied tribal dress. Light, coming low from our direction toward the scene casts a shadow—the shadow of a hill, perhaps—over the bottom third of the foreground while shining a bright, diffuse light over the rest of the painting. When you know what happened to the Hidatsa, how smallpox decimated them in 1837, how they were pushed West by the more powerful Sioux and by white settlers, how they ultimately combined with the equally decimated Mandan and Arikara Nations, the meaning of the setting sun makes sense. And then you remember that Catlin and Bodmer painted here, just before the epidemic, and you see Riley paying homage to these early masters, to their drawing and palettes and you draw a line from them to Riley, masters to master.

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Please note that the first unframed photo is most accurate for color. Framed photographs are to show the frame and are not color corrected to the painting.

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