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43

Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection HENRY F. FARNY (1847-1916) A Moment of Suspe...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:500,000.00 - 700,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection HENRY F. FARNY (1847-1916) A Moment of Suspe...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
HENRY F. FARNY
(1847-1916)
A Moment of Suspense, 1911
signed and dated, "H.F. Farny, 19110•" (lower right)
oil on canvas
24 x 16 in. (61 x 40.6 cm) <p>Estimate: $500,000-700,000 <p> Provenance
Private Collection, Cincinnati Ira Spanierman, Inc., New York Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1980 <p> Exhibited
New York, Ira Spanierman, Inc., Masterworks by Henry Farny, 1981 South Bend, indiana, The Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, The Realistic Expression of Henry Farny: A Retrospective, 1981, p. 50 (illustration) Rome, Musei Vaticani; Lugano, Villa Malpensata, Maestri Americani della Collezione Thyssen-Bornemisza, 1983-1984, no. 34 and 33 respectively (illustrated) Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art; Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts; Denver, The Denver Art Museum; San Antonio, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute; New York, IBM Gallery of Arts and Sciences; San Diego, San Diego Museum of Art; Palm Beach, The Society of the Four Arts, American Masters: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, October 28, 1984-April 13, 1986, no. 35 (illustrated) Kobe, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art; Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum; Tokyo, The Bunkamura Museum of Art; Hiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Two Hundred Years of American Paintings from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, January 5-August 25, 1991, no. 30 <p> Literature
The Magazine Antiques, CXX, November 1981, p. 997 (illustrated) Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, London, 1986, p. 222, no. 72 (illustrated, p. 223) Elizabeth Storm Nagy, Europa e America Dipiniti e acquerelli dell'Ottocento e del Novecento dalla Collezione Thyssen-Bornemisza, Milan, 1993, p. 36, no. 15 (illustrated) <p> From the time of his first trip West in 1881 until his death in 1916, Henry Farny became perhaps the most important painter of native American life since George Catlin. Although the Western frontier was closing with the advent of the transcontinental railroad and with the settlement of most Indian tribes on reservations, Farny still painted the Native American, in his natural setting, with undisguised admiration. The artist himself acknowledged that his oils and watercolors were essentially nostalgic paeans to an endangered way of life. In 1910, he wrote, <p> It breaks my heart to see the prairies cut up with barbed wire, and to see the once noble Red Man debauching himself with fire water on the reservations. The golden West isn't what it used to be.1 <p> Farny's ideal subject depicted Native Americans whose communal mores and closeness to nature included extreme courage and fortitude, and a constant state of heightened sensory awareness. Alertness became one of the cardinal virtues in a life when, at any moment, a hunter could come across game to feed his family or, instead, a dangerous foe. <p>Farny repeatedly explored this subject in his paintings, showing Native Americans alone or in small groups looking and listening for signs of danger and making preparations to combat it. A Moment of Suspense (which is also the title of two other, very different, Farny paintings) shows a group of hunters who have shot a grizzly, still the most powerful and dangerous mammal in the United States. Uncertain if the animal is dead or merely wounded, they approach warily, one of them with rifle drawn, while their dogs bark at the bear's supine form. The rest of their hunting party stands in the distance, holding skittish horses. <p>By using the narrow vertical format that became one of his signature compositional devices, Farny manages to both compress and dramatize the narrative. The steep slashing diagonals of both the path and the mountainside beyond only heighten the tension, while the contrast of brilliant sunlight and deep blue shadow signals impending dusk and the further hardships of darkness and bitter cold. <p>We are grateful to Dr. Bruce Chambers for cataloguing this lot. <p> Notes 1 Denny Carter, Henry Farny, New York, 1978, p. 28.
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