John Ford Clymer
1907-1989
The Métis Brigade
MEDIUM: Oil on canvas
DIMENSIONS: 20 x 40 inches
Signed/CA and dated 72 lower right
SHIPPING DIMENSIONS: 30 x 50 inches
SOLD FOR: $300,000.00
Including Buyers Premium
2026 - APRIL,
LOT 307
Additional Information
Provenance:
Eddie Basha Collection, Arizona
Literature:
John Clymer: An Artist’s Rendezvous with the Frontier West, Walt Reed, Northland Press, Flagstaff, AZ, 1976, p. 124
The Western Paintings of John Clymer, Paul Weaver, Peacock Press/Bantam Book, Bearsville, NY, 1977, Plate 40.
Exhibited:
Clymer, Lovell & Teague at the Gilcrease, The Thomas Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK, 1987.
People, Places, Predicaments: John Clymer’s West, Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West, Scottsdale, AZ, October 8, 2024-October 26, 2025.
The Métis Brigade is one of John Clymer’s most endearing and reproduced images, and it showcases many of the qualities that the artist was known for throughout his successful career: narrative devices in the painting to maximize its story, historical detail acquired through dedicated research, a compelling composition, complexly rendered figures and a sense of cultural context within the larger canon of Western art. Clymer, who was a student of history, didn’t pull at low-hanging fruit when it came to his subjects. He found unique new angles and offered fresh perspectives from the American frontier. All of this is on display in this 1972 painting.
“The picture shows a band of Métis, descendants of the Hudson Bay employees and their Indian wives, spread out, single file, traveling in their Red River carts from the Red River settlement en route to their annual summer buffalo hunt on the prairies,” writes Walt Reed in John Clymer: An Artist’s Rendezvous with the Frontier West. “Their carts were entirely hand made of wood, fastened together with wooden pins and rawhide. The wooden wheels were wrapped in rawhide, put on wet, which when dried became very hard and durable. In this manner, the wheel was introduced to the Indian culture of the Northern Plains by the early French employees of the fur companies. The women and children rode in the carts, pulled by a single ox or horse, while the hunters traveled alongside..”