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173

Clymer, John (1907 - 1989)

Currency:USD Category:Art Start Price:100,000.00 USD Estimated At:100,000.00 - 150,000.00 USD
Clymer, John (1907 - 1989)
<strong>Clymer, John </strong>
(1907 - 1989)

<strong>Last of the Buffalo</strong>

oil on illustration board
24 x 36 inches
signed lower left: <i>J. Clymer</i>

John Ford Clymer was born in Ellensburg, Washington, in 1907, to a railroading family that traced
its ancestry back to George C. Clymer, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Pennsylvania. Clymer was not an enthusiastic student, but his parents recognized his artistic talent and agreed to let him pursue his ambitions as long as he finished high school. Clymer received his earliest instruction from a magazine art correspondence course, and in 1924 he submitted two unsolicited pen and ink drawings to the Colt Firearms Company. Colt promptly purchased them for use in magazine ads.

By 1927, Clymer was living in Vancouver, Canada, painting billboards by day, attending school
in the evening, and working on illustration assignments until late at night. The grueling schedule was taking a toll on the young artist, and he found a summer job working on a sternwheeler paddle
boat on the Yukon River. Clymer met Indians and trappers along the route, an experience about which the artist later remarked, “I never planned it that way, but that chance summer’s trip has guided and shaped my life ever since.” Clymer traveled to Delaware in 1927 to meet Frank Schoonover, the prominent American illustrator, in hopes of receiving advice and encouragement. Schoonover’s advice was, that if Clymer was able to make a living in Canada as an illustrator, he should return and carry on with his work. Clymer took Schoonover’s advice, relocating to Toronto, where the Canadian publishing industry was based. He returned to Delaware in 1930 to study at the Wilmington Academy of Art and met many of the major figures of American illustration art,
including N.C. Wyeth and Harvey Dunn. Clymer and his friend and fellow artist Tom Lovell joined the Marine Corps together in 1942 and were posted in Washington, D.C., creating illustrations for <i>Leatherneck</i> and the <i>Marine Corps Gazette</i> until 1945. Clymer had done one cover for the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i> prior to World War II, and after the war he reestablished his relationship with the publication, producing dozens of covers for the Post over the next 20 years. He made regular summer trips to the Rocky Mountain West and the Pacific Coast in the 1950s and ‘60s, studying the country and its people, and all the while growing less enthusiastic about his magazine assignments.

In the early 1960s, Clymer painted his first historical painting, which sold from the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York within a week. By the middle of the decade Clymer had determined to make a clean break with his past work as an illustrator and to devote himself to fine-art painting with a strong historical orientation. From this period to the end of his life, Clymer built a reputation as one of America’s foremost Western painters, celebrated for his beautifully executed and carefully researched scenes of exploration, commerce, and Indian life in the era of the Frontier West. He created many paintings that dealt with the role of the buffalo in the culture of the Indians of the Great Plains. In <i>Last of the Buffalo,</i> a white sport hunter is shown shooting indiscriminately at the herd thundering by. He is using a modern repeating rifle, and his Indian guide stands ready to hand him a second weapon when the first one is spent. Non-subsistance hunting such as this had a devastating effect: Estimated at over 20 million in 1850, the population of American bison in the United States had been reduced to 541 by 1889.—DC


Provenance:
Private Collection, Wyoming
Private Collection, New Mexico

Literature:
Walt Reed, <i>John Clymer: An Artist’s Rendezvous with the Frontier West, </i>Flagstaff, Arizona; Northland Press, 1976
Catherine A. Reynolds, <i>Cowboy Artists of America,</i> El Paso, Texas: Desert Hawk, 1988
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