Deceased Artists


Charles Partridge Adams (1858-1942), “The Arapahoe Peaks, Autumn Afternoon, near Boulder, Colo.”, oil on canvas 20”x24”, signed lower left.

 

GILBERT GAUL, NA (1855-1919) , A charming view of a Sioux Tipi Encampment at twilight with rising moon, a lone blanketed brave and his dogs, other tipis and campfires flickering in the distance, 1890, oil on canvas 18”x24”, signed Gilbert Gaul lower left, titled on an old tag verso “Sioux Camp, Standing Rock Agency N. Dak, Sept, 1890 by Gaul in Indians Taxed.” The painting is a variant of another Sioux encampment view painted by Gaul at the same time which was reproduced as a chromolithograph color plate in the highly important late 19th century volume, “Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed in the United States in the Eleventh Census, 1890.

Sioux camp by Gaul, chromolithograph from Indians Taxed and Not Taxed. The same bright tipi with heavily smoke stained flaps is present in both paintings, as is the same or similar row of distant lodges and commercial canvas tents. Both were likely painted in a relatively compressed time frame of a couple of days. The close-up with mid day lighting was chosen for publication.

In 1890 Gilbert Gaul was commissioned one of five special agents for the United States Census to visit the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Reservations in North Dakota, during which time he sketched and painted, additionally gathered ethnographic and cultural information and wrote text, and painted a compelling portrait from life of the great Sioux leader Sitting Bull, also reproduced as a full page color plate. Standing Rock had the greatest concentration of what had been regarded as the most warlike of all the Teton bands, and the majority of them had been participants in the Custer Massacre just 14 years earlier.

“Report on Indians Taxed, and Indians Not Taxed in the United States in the Eleventh Census, 1890” 683 pages, is regarded the single most valuable compilation of information known to the U.S. Government at the close of the 19th century about the remaining Indians, broken down by state and tribe, with nearly two hundred photographic plates, maps and 19 striking chromolithographs all done by noted artists of the time, including Gaul, Walter Shirlaw, Julian Scott and Peter Moran. A fine and complete copy of this rare and important book on late 19th century American Indians, and which includes both the encampment and Sitting Bull chromolithographs, accompanies the painting.

 

VICTOR CASENELLI, American (1867-1961) Untitled mounted plains indian with packhorse in woodlands at sunset, gouache and watercolor on board 12”x20” sight, signed lower right, early 20th century, ex-collection Edward M. Woliver, MD. Born in New York City, and active in Cincinnati from the mid 1880-’s until 1905, Casenelli, though his acquaintance with Henry Farny, John Hauser, Joseph Sharp and other western-oriented Cincinnati painters, began to paint Native American subjects. He later moved to Michigan

 

BURT PROCTER (1901-1980), Untitled mounted Navajo, red sandstone, oil on board 12”x16”, signed Burt Procter, lower left, c. 1970.

 

LLOYD MOYLAN (1893-1963) untitled New Mexico landscape with wild horses in an arroyo with stream, oil on board 12”x14”, signed Lloyd Moylan lower left, ca. 1932.
Lloyd Moylan, originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, studied at the Minneapolis Art Institute, the Art Student’s League in New York, 1917-19, and later, beginning in 1922, at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs. He taught at the Broadmoor Art Academy from 1929 to 1931, He made numerous painting trips to Arizona and New Mexico during his years in Colorado Springs, and finally moved permanently to New Mexico, where he painted Indian genre and mural art and ultimately became the Curator of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe, the predecessor to today’s famed Wheelwright Museum.
Moylan is well known for the large murals of indian subject matter which he created in the Cheyenne School and Ute theatre, Colorado Springs, stimulated in part by his trips to Mexico and exposure to the burgeoning mural movement there. Later, and under the sponsorship of the WPA, Moylan executed a large mural spanning two floors in the administration building of Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico, a 2,000 square foot mural in the McKinley County courthouse in Gallup, New Mexico, as well as murals at eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico., and in the Hilton Hotel, Albuquerque. Exhibited: Art Institute of Chicago, Broadmoor Art Academy, University of Colorado Museum. Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, Penrose Public Library, Colorado Springs, University of New Mexico Museum, Albuquerque, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, and many New Mexico and Colorado Springs private collections. Moylan died in Gallup, where he taught art at the Gallup High School.
Stylistically, Moylan was a regionalist modernist, and work from his prime period in the 1930’s had a strong art deco flavor with simplified line and muscular composition, very much in tune with the social realism and WPA aesthetic of the period. The present example is notable for its heavily impastoed brushwork and tactile surface.

All images copyright Neal R. Smith Fine Art, 2008-2009 and are not to be reproduced without authorization.
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