A Successful Hunt
Henry François Farny
1906 · Gouache, watercolor, gum Arabic glazes, charcoal on white wove paper mounted on board · The American Wing
While his contemporaries, including artists Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, often celebrated the “winning of the West,” French-born Farny created peaceful, elegiac scenes of Native Americans engaged in everyday rituals, always in harmony with their natural environment. Using clothing, artifacts, and sketches collected from his western trips between 1881 and 1894, the Cincinnati-based artist focused on motifs representing Indigenous lifeways from the years before Euro-American settlement and forced Native relocation onto U.S. government reservations. In “A Successful Hunt,” a procession of figures in traditional dress traverses a high-altitude pass as they return from the daily work of seeking sustenance. Farny paid particular attention to the diverse effects of natural light on the Rocky Mountain landscape.
- Artist
- Henry François Farny
- Date
- 1906
- Medium
- Gouache, watercolor, gum Arabic glazes, charcoal on white wove paper mounted on board
- Culture
- American
- Department
- The American Wing
- Credit line
- Marguerite and Frank A. Cosgrove Jr. Fund, 2015
