James Bama
1926-2022
Timber Jack Joe
MEDIUM: Oil on board
DIMENSIONS: 24 x 18 inches
Signed and dated 72 lower right
SHIPPING DIMENSIONS: 33 x 27 inches
SOLD FOR: $36,000.00
Including Buyers Premium
2026 - APRIL,
LOT 351
Additional Information
Provenance:
Private collection, Massachusetts
When James Bama found figures he liked to paint, he returned to them as subjects several times. Timber Jack Joe is one of those subjects. The model’s real name was Joseph Ernest Lynde, and he played a significant role in Bama’s career by introducing him to the modern-day mountain man. “At one time or another Joe had been a sheepherder, farmer, rancher, miner and a timber contractor for the U.S. Forest Service. He was a man who seemed to have been born out of his natural time,” writes Elmer Kelton in The Art of James Bama. “When Bama first met him, he was living out a fantasy of the past in the mountains, trapping, venturing down in beard, beads, colorful buckskins and skunk cap for fairs and parades. He often lectured schoolchildren on the lives of the original mountain men who were the first whites to leave their moccasin prints in many hidden parts of the Rockies. His constant companions were his Appaloosa horse, Papoosie, and a shepherd dog, Tuffy, which rode behind Joe's saddle in countless parades.” Actor Slim Pickens said of Lynde: "I believe the good Lord played an awful trick on Timber Jack Joe by putting him here in this day and age, but thank God he did, 'cause now the rest of us know how a real mountain man looked, dressed and smelled.”