Lot 48: WILLIAM DE LA MONTAGNE CARY (1840-1922)

Custer Attacking an Indian Village
signed 'W.M. Cary' (lower right)
oil on canvas
18 x 29 7/8 in. (45.7 x 75.9 cm.)

Private collection, New York, acquired directly from the artist.
By descent in the family to the present owner.

Known for his sympathetic and historically accurate depictions of the Plains Indians, Cary captures a very different moment in American history in Custer Attacking An Indian Village. This painting is one of only a few (possibly only two) oil paintings executed by William de la Montagne Cary that depict General George Custer.

Born in Tappan, New York in 1840, William de la Montagne Cary's family moved to Greenwich Village when the artist was a young child. He was apprenticed to an engraver at age 14 after exhibiting artistic talent, and during his teenage years produced paintings and drawings as well.

Cary was interested early on in the American West and made his first of two trips there in 1861 joined by two friends. The group journeyed first to St. Louis and then went on to explore the area along the Upper Missouri River. They continued traveling west to Portland and then to San Francisco. From there Cary returned to New York by boat armed with numerous sketches produced on the trip that recorded the forts and the Indians he encountered in the area.

The subsequent onset of the Civil War irrevocably altered the landscape and lives of the Plains peoples. Consequently the sketches and written observations that Cary made on his trip west became of great historical significance and provided the artist with decades worth of first-hand materials with which to produce finished oils and commercial work for such publications as Harpers Weekly and Scribner's Magazine. Cary traveled West again in 1874, in the company of a United States Government team surveying the Northern Boundary and produced another series of sketches on this second trip.

In Custer Attacking an Indian Village, Cary captures a tense and violent moment early on in the Indian Wars between the United States and Native Peoples that began in the 1860s. Custer leads the charge toward an armed village of Cheyenne Indians as the first shots are exchanged. He rides hard, leaning forward in the saddle with his pistol raised above his head, and is surrounded by a large group of American soldiers on horseback, two of which have been wounded already. The figures on both sides of the conflict stand out against the snow-covered landscape and early morning sun-filled sky.

"A family account... indicates that Cary was in the west during the outbreak of the Indian wars and was 'for a time with Lieutenant Colonel Custer of the Seventh United States Cavalry under General Hancock in the expedition against the Cheyenne Indians.'" (as quoted in M.D. Ladner, William de la Montagne Cary: Artist on the Missouri River, Norman, Oklahoma, 1984, p. 89)

The present work is a unique and historically important first-hand observation of an early battle in the Indian Wars that would continue for over 20 years. It has been in a private collection since it was gifted by the artist to the present owner's great grandfather, a tavern owner in Harlem, New York, who accepted the painting in exchange for debts owed.