Lot Essay
Born in Philadelphia in 1818, Charles Deas aspired to an Army career, but upon failing to obtain an appointment to West Point he moved to New York to pursue his childhood passion for painting and drawing. The opening of George Catlin's Indian Gallery in 1837 inspired the young artist to follow the path established earlier by Catlin, Alfred Jacob Miller, and Seth Eastman, and in 1840 he traveled to Fort Crawford in Wisconsin, to document "the picturesque forms, costumes, attitudes and grouping of Nature's own children...in the very heart of the noblest scenery of the land..." (H. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists).
Deas settled in St. Louis, and for the next eight years made periodic forays into Indian territory, traveling to Forts Winnebago, Snelling, and Atkinson, and sketching and painting the Sioux, Winnebago, and Sac and Fox tribes, as well as the traders and trappers that formed an integral part of life on the frontier. During this time he exhibited frequently, often contributing to the American Art Union lotteries in New York, and including paintings in the galleries and fairs in St. Louis. Indian Warrior on the Edge of a Precipice was favorably noticed in the October 26, 1847 issue of the St. Louis Daily Reveille:
Mr. Wool, on Fourth Street, near Odd Fellows Hall, has received a new painting from the celebrated artist, Deas. The subject is a solitary Indian seated on the edge of a bold precipice. The form is naked, with the exception of a blanket thrown loosely round his middle, and a moccasin on one foot. A cataract is rushing by his perilous perch, and beneath him rise the points of a wild and craggy mountain scene... The figure is finished in this artist's fine, bold style, and will add to his high reputation as a painter of western subjects.
Indian Warrior on the Edge of a Precipice may have been painted in anticipation of Deas's attempt to raise money through subscription for an exhibition of Indian paintings, similar to Catlin's, to travel throughout the United States and Europe. The figure, possibly Sioux, wears a hide wrapping decorated with geometric border designs in red quill or paint and carriÿs a spipe-tomahawk ttypical of the Plains Indians in his hand. Deas incorporates his usual fidelity to detail into a romantic and mysterious representation of a solitary Indian surveying a vast wilderness landscape. The painting evokes the majesty and nobility of "a race fast dwindling from the earth," a phrase taken from the handwritten "Plan for an Indian Gallery" that one of Deas's kinsman circulated to wealthy acquaintances in 1848. What investors' response to such a project might have been remains unknown, for by this time Deas had already begun to succumb to the "strange dreams of a distempered brain" that eventually led to his death in the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York in 1868. Paintings such as the Indian Warrior remain as testimony to the vividness and imagination with which he captured a rapidly disappearing part of native American culture.
Deas settled in St. Louis, and for the next eight years made periodic forays into Indian territory, traveling to Forts Winnebago, Snelling, and Atkinson, and sketching and painting the Sioux, Winnebago, and Sac and Fox tribes, as well as the traders and trappers that formed an integral part of life on the frontier. During this time he exhibited frequently, often contributing to the American Art Union lotteries in New York, and including paintings in the galleries and fairs in St. Louis. Indian Warrior on the Edge of a Precipice was favorably noticed in the October 26, 1847 issue of the St. Louis Daily Reveille:
Mr. Wool, on Fourth Street, near Odd Fellows Hall, has received a new painting from the celebrated artist, Deas. The subject is a solitary Indian seated on the edge of a bold precipice. The form is naked, with the exception of a blanket thrown loosely round his middle, and a moccasin on one foot. A cataract is rushing by his perilous perch, and beneath him rise the points of a wild and craggy mountain scene... The figure is finished in this artist's fine, bold style, and will add to his high reputation as a painter of western subjects.
Indian Warrior on the Edge of a Precipice may have been painted in anticipation of Deas's attempt to raise money through subscription for an exhibition of Indian paintings, similar to Catlin's, to travel throughout the United States and Europe. The figure, possibly Sioux, wears a hide wrapping decorated with geometric border designs in red quill or paint and carriÿs a spipe-tomahawk ttypical of the Plains Indians in his hand. Deas incorporates his usual fidelity to detail into a romantic and mysterious representation of a solitary Indian surveying a vast wilderness landscape. The painting evokes the majesty and nobility of "a race fast dwindling from the earth," a phrase taken from the handwritten "Plan for an Indian Gallery" that one of Deas's kinsman circulated to wealthy acquaintances in 1848. What investors' response to such a project might have been remains unknown, for by this time Deas had already begun to succumb to the "strange dreams of a distempered brain" that eventually led to his death in the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York in 1868. Paintings such as the Indian Warrior remain as testimony to the vividness and imagination with which he captured a rapidly disappearing part of native American culture.