Western and Wildlife Art, including Contemporary Native American Art

Provenance:

Private Collection, Idaho.

Literature:

J. W. McSpadden, Famous Sculptors of America, New York, 1924, p. 315.

W. Craven, Sculpture in America, New York, 1968, pp. 519, 548, fig. 14.2, another example illustrated.

T. Tolles, American Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1865 and 1885, vol. II, New York, 1999, no. 212, pp. 480-81, another example illustrated.

Lot Essay:

In 1902, MacNeil was commissioned by David P. Thompson, a prominent businessman and public official in Portland, Oregon, to create a commemorative memorial, which would be a gift to the city in Thompson's name. The resulting work, The Coming of the White Man, depicts the chief of the Multnomah tribe and his medicine man standing on a large, boulderlike pedestal. The Multnomah are a tribe of Chinookan people native to the Portland Basin residing near the mouth of the Willamette River. In his planning of this iconic image of one of the vanishing tribes of the Pacific Northwest, MacNeil took immense care to ensure ethnographic accuracy. Unveiled in 1907 in Portland's Washington Park, the monument is situated on a hill overlooking the Columbia River gorge, the same river by which Lewis and Clark had come through the Rockies to reach the Pacific ocean. Because the figure of the chief was particularly admired, MacNeil modeled it on a smaller scale and had it cast as a statuette titled Chief of the Multnomah Tribe.  In this work, MacNeil has represented the subject in a standing pose of great dignity, with his arms crossed strongly across his puffed-up chest, and his chin and head held high. In this model, the artist has rendered the figure with a feathered headdress and added a bow and quiver of arrows in addition to the shield on his back, neither of which were included in the monumental figural group.