2015 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction / Lot 234273 / 290 • View Catalog •
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VERSO
Signed and titled
According to the artist, “The young Sioux woman is wearing a dress of the 1850 period. The sleeves of the hide dress are left natural; the yoke is fully beaded with pony beads. Her hair is hanging loose as it would be if she had just washed or oiled it. The bowl is carved out of wood and is used for eating. It could be attached with a buckskin thong.”
In The Art of Howard Terpning, Elmer Kelton wrote, “The woman’s place in Plains Indian culture included most of the drudgery involved in setting up camp, the skinning, tanning, putting up of meat, cooking, water-carrying, wood-gathering, sewing, housekeeping, and, of course, childbearing and rearing. Yet as homemaker, wife, and mother, she was an indispensable part of tribal life.
“Though her life in retrospect may seem mundane, Charles Alexander Eastman, Sioux physician-historian, declared, ‘It has been said that the position of woman is the test of civilization, and that of our women was secure. In them was vested our standard of morals and the purity of our blood. The wife did not take the name of her husband nor enter his clan, and the children belonged to the clan of the mother. All of the family property was held by her, descent was traced in the maternal line, and the honor of the house was in her hands.’”
EXHIBITED
National Academy of Western Art Tenth Annual Exhibition, National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, Oklahoma City, OK, June 12 - Sept 12, 1982
LITERATURE
Don Dedera, Howard Terpning: The Storyteller (Trumbull, CT: The Greenwich Workshop, Inc., 1989), page 40, illustrated
Exhibition catalog, National Academy of Western Art Tenth Annual Exhibition (Oklahoma City, OK: National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, 1982), illustrated
Elmer Kelton, The Art of Howard Terpning (Trumbill, CT: The Greenwich Workshop, Inc., 1992), page 69, illustrated
