| Object ID |
T0480 |
| Object Name |
Drawing - Two Bear's War Record |
| Description |
Medium/Materials: Pencil and colored pencil on paper;
Marks: Recto at bottom in pencil: "Two Bears War Record"; name glyph in pencil illustrates a plant stalk.; |
| Dimensions |
H-23 W-18 inches |
| Early Date |
1870 ca. |
| Medium |
Pencil and colored pencil on paper |
| Place of Origin |
USA |
| People |
Cheyenne/ |
| Provenance |
(1) Standing Rock, North Dakota and South Dakota. Reportedly collected in the late 19th century.;
(2) Milwaukee Public Museum. Milwaukee, Wisconsin.;
(3) Bernard Brown. Milwaukee, Wisconsin.;
(4) George Terasaki. New York, New York.;
(5) Don Ellis. Dundas, Ontario, Canada.;
(6) Eugene V. Thaw.;
|
| History |
Scholarly Attributions:
[1] Ross Frank/Assis. Prof./University of CA, San Diego letter to Donald Ellis, 11/29/96, see files: "....I have pieced together a little information about how some of the Milwaukee drawings came to be deaccessioned in the late 1960s. I suspect that the story also applies to the group of large drawings that we have been conversing about: The Museum hired Bernard Brown, a Milwaukee art dealer, to appraise the Ethnology collection. By some arrangement, Mr. Brown acquired three or four pages of a ledger book of 116 drawings obtained by Captain R. Miller in January 1891 from a Lakota warrior at Wounded Knee [As the recent PLAINS INDIAN DRAWINGS 1865-1935: PAGES FROM A VISUAL HISTORY points out, it is often said that the drawings were taken from the body of dead Lakota after Wounded Knee. Red Hawk did not die at Wounded Knee but at the Pine Ridge Agency over twenty years later.] The Lakota artist Red Hawk (Cetan Hita) created the drawings and hence the work is known as the Red Hawk Ledger Book. One of the pages isnow at Heritage Plantation in Cape Cod, and I know of at least one page in a private collection. The two large drawings that you have are not directly related to Red Hawk. At this point I am able to make only a few observations and indicate the work that still must be done to understand more about them. 1) I believe that the two drawings are by the same hand. I say this on stylistic grounds, the most obvious are close similarities in the manner in which the artist has drawn the horses' and warriors' heads, ears and eyes. The eyes are all composed of an ellipse drawn from the front of the face back and leaving an opening at the front. The eyeball is then indicated by a single curved line bisecting the eye. The warriors all have a small curved line to represent the nostrils or to distinguish the base of their nose from their upper lip. The horses also have a characteristic bump indicating their nostrils. The drawing of the eyes particularly distinguished this hand from that of other ledger artists. 2) My
opinion is that the artist is Cheyenne, probably Southern Cheyenne. The enemy soldiers are Pawnee and Crow, which accords with Cheyenne historical enemies. The feathered and crooked lances, the hair-fringed buckskin shirts, the silver arm bands over the sleeves of the bottom warrior in the larger drawing, and the use of a variety of headdress styles - horned with feather train, typical feather bonnet, and round "stand-up" bonnet - point towards Cheyenne. The manner of drawing the noses mentioned above appeals to me as something of a southern plains stylistic trait, normally Cheyenne and occasionally Kiowa (Wohaw and Silverhorn use a similar convention in drawing noses). 3) Because of the size of the work and subject matter, I would posit that these drawings are from the early reservation period. (Viewing the paper medium, and particularly the back of each drawing would help here.) The artists' technique also shows some of the stylized influenced of later ledger artists (the angular flow of the war shirt andheaddress decorations) and the artist used some drawing shortcuts (horse outlines drawn from a template) associated with the reservation period. However, the feeling of a cohesive narrative embodied in the whole composition, and the precise rendering of details of clothing and weapons, suggests an artist still closely connected to Plains warfare by personal experience. [2] Letter from Imre Nagy - 23 March 1998 - "I was always puzzled by the style and details of this drawing in that AIAM (Vol. 2, No. 3) ad of George Terasaki. Without being able to see the whole composition on a xerox and slide I do not wish to go into details. It definitely does not belong to the so-called 'Red Hawk' drawings of the Milwaukee Public Museum. I always had some feeling that this might be a fake but I need a chance to examine it in more detail." [3] Thaw catalogue entry written by Joe Horse Capture - June 1998 - identifies as possibly Southern Cheyenne ca.1870. |
| Used |
Cheyenne |
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