William Herbert Dunton

(1878-1936)

Blackfeet Indians moving to the Buffalo Range 12 x 16in framed 15 x 19in

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, Indiana.

We wish to thank Michael R. Grauer for his kind assistance cataloguing this lot. This painting will be included in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.

Born on a farm in rural Maine, William Herbert 'Buck' Dunton was interested in animals, hunting and outdoor endeavors from the time he was a child. When he was 18, Dunton made his first trip West to Montana and would continue making yearly summer trips to various Western states between 1896 and 1911. In 1897, Dunton studied briefly at the Cowles Art School in Boston and under local artists before starting his career as an illustrator. Success as a commercial illustrator came quickly for the artist, and he regularly contributed work for books and magazines including Harper's and Scribner's.

At the invitation of artist Ernest Blumenschein, Dunton visited Taos for the first time in 1912, and settled permanently there two years later. In Taos, Dunton was able to combine his interests in painting Native American, cowboy, animal and landscape subjects with hunting and an Old West lifestyle, and moved away from the financially rewarding but stressful work as an illustrator. ¹ Between 1914 and 1935, Dunton regularly exhibited his work at the most prestigious arts groups in the US: the National Academy of Design, Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists in 1915 along with Blumenschein, Eanger Irving Couse, Bert Geer Phillips, and Joseph Henry Sharp. Dunton exhibited with the group until 1922 when he resigned from the Society. He continued exhibiting on his own through the early 30s.

According to Michael Grauer, "Between 1912 and 1920 in the Taos area, Dunton posed and painted en plein air lone cowboys/vaqueros or American Indians or groups of cowboys or Indians. The distinguishing characteristic of these paintings by the late 'teens is that the figure(s) is/are silhouetted against the sky following what Dr. William H. Gerdts has called "the glare aesthetic." Blackfeet Indians Moving to the Buffalo Range is part of this group. The paintings in this "series" also exhibit the same expressive brushwork and heavy impasto, a characteristic Dunton learned from the American Impressionists whose work he saw in Boston and New York from 1903 to 1915." ²

"Blackfeet Indians Moving to the Buffalo Range clearly shows the influence of Charles M. Russell on Dunton's work as Russell's painted a number of scenes of Blackfeet women pulling travois as seen in your painting. [The painting] also indicates Dunton's familiarity with Frederic Remington's late work where the white-hot light of the arid West affects all color. Blackfeet Indians Moving to the Buffalo Range is part of a group of paintings Dunton created between 1916 and 1920 depicting American Indians on the Northern Plains, including Winter Camp of the Sioux; Crows; The Buffalo Signal; and Blackfeet Hunters." ³

In Blackfeet Indians Moving to the Buffalo Range mounted figures move from right to left across a scrubby landscape on a bright, clear day. The central figure, mounted on a pinto horse, carries a cradleboard on her back and transports her belongings behind her on a travois, designed for moving over dry land. Behind her to her right, a man in a war bonnet holds a spear upright, while other mounted figures move along the middle ground of the scene painted with just a few gestural brushstrokes. "Dunton's rendering of the sagebrush in the foreground of [the painting] demonstrate how he toyed with the dissolution of forms through dynamic brushwork, common to impressionist painting. We also see in the sky and clouds in the background an almost pointilliste brushstroke." ⁴

"Dunton insisted upon appropriate clothing and accoutrements in his paintings, although he never descended into accuracy for its own sake...Dunton's first trip to the West in 1896 took him to Livingston, Montana, where he worked for a season as a meat hunter for ranches and likely saw Northern Plains tribespeople. He also created a sketchbook in about 1905 in which he depicted Northern Plains peoples and their material culture objects. Dunton also had a significant collection of Plains material culture objects in his personal collection to aid him in composing his canvases. The woman in the foreground of Blackfeet Indians Moving to the Buffalo Range wears a Northern Plains-style buckskin dress, rides a Northern Plains woman's saddle, carries a Northern Plains cradleboard on her back, and wears vermillion circles on her cheeks a characteristic of many Plains tribes captured by other Western artists such as Maynard Dixon and E.A. Burbank." <sup>5

1</sup> M. Grauer, W. Herbert Dunton Biographical Information (www.dunton.org/whd_exhibit/whd_biography.htm)
² M. Grauer, letter to Bonhams, January 27, 2021.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.