Western & Contemporary Native American Art

Provenance:

J.N. Bartfield Galleries, New York, New York

Midwestern Galleries, Cincinnati, Ohio

Henry Farny’s family emigrated from France in 1848 and settled in Cincinnati, a burgeoning city that quickly became a nursery for important American artists. Native Americans fascinated Farny, but he often noted the disparity between their portrayals as fierce, tragic warriors, and their reality as casualties of American expansion. Still, the prospect of one day heading West to paint aroused his ambition to make his life in art. He apprenticed with a lithographer, drawing Civil War scenes that led to work with Harper’s Weekly and a meeting with the American ambassador to Rome—a fellow Cincinnatian—led to studies in Europe. Farny studied in Rome, Dusseldorf, Munich, and Paris and returned to Cincinnati in 1870. In 1878, he ventured on a thousand-mile trip down the Missouri River, living among and painting the Blackfeet, Crow, Sioux, and Zuni Indians, observing their cultures and learning their languages. He became an ardent advocate for Indigenous Peoples. As his career and reputation flourished, his friends became a who’s who of the late 19th century: Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Ulysses S. Grant, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, and Theodore Roosevelt, who was especially fond of the artist and supportive of his work. Moonlit Landscape is a lovely gem. It’s a monochromatic nocturne, a landscape of light and shadow seen through trees that Corot might envy, light and shadow falling on water, coming to rest on a wooded mountain in the middle distance. Farny layers the grayscale tones and lets white create day in the deep mystery of night. The sliver of moon at upper right is a Farny trademark. This and other aspects of Moonlit Landscape appear throughout his work, especially in his beautiful, prized gouaches.

-James D. Balestrieri