PBA Galleries

Original oil on canvas. 61x91 cm (24x35¾"). Ornate gilt frame, overall 84x114.5 cm (33x45").

Charles Craig (1846-1931) was born in 1846 in Morgan County, Ohio. At 19 he journeyed west, traveling the Missouri River to Fort Benton, Montana where he spent several years sketching and living with native tribes. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was a pupil of Peter Moran, younger brother of Thomas Moran. In the 1880s he settled in the West, first at Taos, New Mexico where he is noted as the first Western artist to paint and eventually settling in Colorado Springs, Colorado where he would actively paint for the next fifty years. His paintings of American Indians can be found in numerous museum collections including the Colorado Springs Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, etc. The present painting depicts a group of six Native American warriors on horseback, one with a rifle across his lap, observing from behind a tree line in preparation for ambush. Provenance: The collection of Jean Laubenfels, her name branded in the top stretcher on the rear.