Page 154 - 2015 Russell Catalogue

208JAMES EARLE FRASER (1876–1953)The End of The Trailbronze31 3⁄4 x 26 x 8 inchesSigned © Fraser, dated 1918, numbered 4 and inscribed Roman Bronze Works N-Y-; also numbered R.B.4. beneath the base.Undoubtedly one of the most famous sculptures of the American West, and certainly Fraser’s best-known work, The End of the Trail was inspired by a passage from a poem by Marion Manville Pope. It “dramatizes the absolute despair of the American Indian at the final loss of his native land. It has become the symbol of the total defeat of the Indian by the white man.”1 The first model for this sculpture was executed in the studio of Richard Bock in 1894. The original plaster model of heroic size (height: 18 feet) was exhibited at the Pan-Pacific Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915 and is now in the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, OK. A full-size bronze cast of this piece executed in 1971 now stands at Mooney Grove in Visalia, California. In addition, there is a life-size cast in Waupun, WI. At the dedication in Wisconsin, Fraser revealed that the Seneca chief John Big Tree was the model for the Indian, having posed in Coney Island in 1912. This bronze is a reduction of the heroic statue and was produced in April 1918 by Roman Bronze Works. It is number four of the thirty-three casts recorded in the Roman Bronze Works Archives, located at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX. The bronze was cast for Bendann Art Galleries, Baltimore, MD, and surfaced again to be sold at Sotheby’s, New York, April 25, 1980.$350,000–550,000 PROVENANCE• Bendann’s Gallery, 1918• Sotheby’s, New York, 25 April 1980, lot 179• David Defrancessca, acquired from the above.• Private collection, Texas, acquired from the above, 1980.• [With] Altermann Galleries & Auctioneers, Santa Fe, NM.• Private collection, from the above, 1992.• [With] Christie’s, New York, 23 April 2013, lot 27.• Acquired by the present owner from the above.________1Patricia Jane Broder, Bronzes of the American West (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1974), 18.