2023 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction / Lot 12122 / 306 • View Catalog •
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According to the artist’s daughter Ruth Koerner Oliver, “The cowboys, the ranch women, the Indians, each recognized my father’s talent and were always interested in him for they knew that if they gave him information, he would preserve it in his paintings of the West. They took every opportunity to include W. H. D. K. in their activities and none were staged for his benefit. Koerner saw the West as it really was!
“We were standing in the doorway of our log cabin, watching a man and his two pack horses start up the back trail toward his mine when a short, rough-looking man walked briskly toward us. His eyes were keen, his hair shaggy, and his skin hardened by years spent in the open. He stopped abruptly.
“‘Is it true,’ he asked our mother, ‘that your man is Koerner of the Post?’
“Mother smiled assent.
“‘Say, lady, maybe you don’t know it, but yer married to a great painter. I’ve said it myself many’s the time, sitting o’nights lookin’ at them pictures he done of the West. I’ve got ‘em hung up in my cabin. I’ve lived them days. Say, tell me, does your man know he tells the truth in his pictures?’
“And that, I think, sums up my father’s work. He tells the truth in his pictures.”
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Carson, California
LITERATURE
Edmund Ware, “On the Road to Jericho’s.” American Magazine, vol. 107, no. 1, 1929, illustrated
