Frank McCarthy

(American, 1924-2002)

As the Mist Still Rises, 1977

oil on board

signed McCarthy and dated (lower left); signed and titled (verso)

24 x 36 inches

Property from the Collection of a Missouri Company

This lot is located in Denver.

Provenance:

Altermann & Morris Galleries, Dallas, Texas (label verso)

Frank McCarthy (1924-2002) was a prominent member of the Cowboy Artists of America (CAA), a community of Western artists formed in 1965, whose avowed mission was to conjure mythical notions and imagery of the Old West through dynamic, action-packed scenes.

In As the Mist Still Rises, the viewer is acquainted with a group of frontiersmen on horseback crossing a stream in a mountainous landscape. The painting exudes a nostalgic form of realism, enhanced by the bright sunlight seemingly shining a spotlight on the riders. Their gaze is facing left, as if they were looking back, holding on to a receding past. The low angle dramatizes this narrative, as it elevates the figures and affirms the grandeur of the setting, the towering trees and peaks slowly subsiding in the background. The precise draftsmanship and attentive details – the powder horns, the furs, their moccasins and general accoutrement – fix the horsemen in this distinct moment in time, the fur trade era, poised between an inexorably elusive past and a daunting future.

The painting is a work of memorialization, but also one that requires imagination and is steeped in myth. It preserves a certain idea of the Old West, grand, lush and pioneering, before the turn of the twentieth century when landscapes started to change. In that sense, McCarthy stands in the lineage of Western masters Frederick Remington and Charles Russell, who decades prior experienced and mourned the end of that era in their own work.