.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The present work is one of at least fifteen known casts of The Indian Hunter. Other examples are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado.
The artist first exhibited a plaster model of The Indian Hunter in the present size in 1859 at the Washington, D.C. Art Association exhibit and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The model was warmly received in New York, and bronzes were cast beginning in 1860. The enthusiastic public and critical reception of The Indian Hunter encouraged Ward to attempt an over-lifesize enlargement, which he achieved first in a large plaster model completed in 1865. This large plaster was shown in a store on Broadway where it was seen by a group of patrons who contributed enough funding to have it cast in bronze and ultimately presented to the City of New York in 1868. Its installation in Central Park made the large-scale The Indian Hunter the first work by an American sculptor to be installed there.
Karen O. Janovy writes, "John Quincy Adams Ward's Indian Hunter established him as a sculpture of American subjects whose combination of realism and vigorous outdoors masculinity in bronze stood in opposition to the marble female nudes of his peers in Italy, who worked in a neoclassical style Ward feared drew 'a sculptor's manhood out of him.' Indeed, The Indian Hunter helped Ward's reputation survive the changes introduced to sculpture after the Civil War by French naturalism. As Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the American leader of that school said, 'His work and career, his virility and sincerity, have been a great incentive to me, from the day when he exhibited his Indian Hunter in an art store on the east side of Broadway." (Sculpture from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2005, p. 7)
The artist first exhibited a plaster model of The Indian Hunter in the present size in 1859 at the Washington, D.C. Art Association exhibit and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The model was warmly received in New York, and bronzes were cast beginning in 1860. The enthusiastic public and critical reception of The Indian Hunter encouraged Ward to attempt an over-lifesize enlargement, which he achieved first in a large plaster model completed in 1865. This large plaster was shown in a store on Broadway where it was seen by a group of patrons who contributed enough funding to have it cast in bronze and ultimately presented to the City of New York in 1868. Its installation in Central Park made the large-scale The Indian Hunter the first work by an American sculptor to be installed there.
Karen O. Janovy writes, "John Quincy Adams Ward's Indian Hunter established him as a sculpture of American subjects whose combination of realism and vigorous outdoors masculinity in bronze stood in opposition to the marble female nudes of his peers in Italy, who worked in a neoclassical style Ward feared drew 'a sculptor's manhood out of him.' Indeed, The Indian Hunter helped Ward's reputation survive the changes introduced to sculpture after the Civil War by French naturalism. As Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the American leader of that school said, 'His work and career, his virility and sincerity, have been a great incentive to me, from the day when he exhibited his Indian Hunter in an art store on the east side of Broadway." (Sculpture from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2005, p. 7)