Page 20 - 2021 March Sealed Bid Catalogue

Lot 8—W.H.D. KOERNER—Indians Attacking Stagecoach (1928)
This painting by W.H.D. Koerner depicts a perilous stagecoach attack. As the list below details, it has had a noteworthy
extensive exhibition history.
William Koerner emigrated to the U.S. from Germany with his family at the age of two. They settled in Clinton, Iowa in 1880. Showing early artistic talent, he was working for the Chicago Tribune as a staff artist while still a teenager. After a short stint in his early twenties as a magazine editor in Battle Creek, Michigan, he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League. From there he moved to Wilmington, Delaware to study under the legendary Howard Pyle for several years in the tradition of other accomplished artists such as N.C. Wyeth, Philip R. Goodwin, Alan Tupper True, and Frank Schoonover.
In 1924, he made a trip west and established a studio for many subsequent summers near Montana’s Crow Indian Reservation, which is on the Custer Battlefield. His subsequent western travels included trips by rail to California and Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. These afforded opportunities to sketch and photograph interesting activities, landscapes, and western events. Koerner also maintained a studio back in New Jersey for Fall and Winter occasions. It was well stocked with Indian and other western collectibles and artifacts.
Frederic Remington, Downing the Nigh Leader (1907), Private Collection
Indians Attacking Stagecoach was owned by Bill Blackmore of Midland, Texas for
over three and a half decades and was then acquired and owned in the well-known John F. Eulich Collection for another seven years. The current owner has held it for another twenty-two years. One of the likely reasons for the long exhibition history of this painting is that the composition is evocative of (and possibly even inspired by) Frederic Remington’s masterpiece titled, Downing the Nigh Leader. Coincidentally, it also echoes much of
the same chaotic scene as one sees in a pen and ink composition by C.M. Russell that appears on page 50 of Back-Trailing on The Old Frontiers.
Following is the view of noted Remington scholar, Harold McCracken regarding that similar Remington composition:
The Frederic Remington oil painting Downing the Nigh Leader is the finest of our documentary art of the early days of the American West. In its artistic quality as well as a realistic portrayal of a dramatic incident in the history of that important era in American history there is no superior example; and this opinion is shared by many in the field of Western art whose judgment demands respect ... The special artistic effort and detail he put in Downing the Nigh Leader is strong evidence
that this painting is based on an actual incident. Painted in 1907, in the second year before his death, and at the height of his ability as an easel painter, it is understandable why it is considered by so many experts as his finest work.
C.M. Russell, Stage Coach Attacked by Indians. Russell created this pen and ink drawing of a similar subject for the Cheely- Raban Syndicate’s Back Trailing on the Old Frontier.