Martin Grelle
b. 1954
Last of the Pemmican
MEDIUM: Oil on canvas
DIMENSIONS: 48 x 72 inches
Signed/CA and dated 2005 lower right
SOLD FOR: $270,000.00
Including Buyers Premium
2026 - APRIL,
LOT 256
Additional Information
Provenance:
Private collection, Colorado
Although the situation is not yet dire, there is an urgency in Martin Grelle’s Last of the Pemmican, which shows four Native American hunters eating the last of their food rations while on a cold and futile hunt. “There are references to pemmican in many of the books about Native American culture and life,” Grelle says of the work. “Pemmican was a food made by pounding jerked meat into a fine consistency, and combining it with the pulp of pounded chokecherries and suet (hard fat), which was then formed into small cakes that could be stored in rawhide cases, and taken easily on hunts, war parties and horse raids. In one reference, I read that ‘they did their best to preserve their pemmican and dried meat for the direst emergencies.’ This is what I have tried to portray in the painting: cold, weary hunters who have been unsuccessful in finding fresh food, and have gotten down to the last of the food they brought with them—the last of the pemmican.”