Bronze Hound's Art Collection: Primitive Chant to the Great Spirit by Hermon Atkins MacNeil (February 27, 1866

To kick off my return to blogging, I've decided to share yet another very special bronze that I own. I won it in an online auction, paying more for it than I did for my car. However I still paid well under the going rate for this bronze had it been listed for sale with an auction house. I am thrilled to own this magnificent piece of history!

Hermon Atkins MacNeil was a 27 year old sculptor and art professor at Cornell University when he was offered an opportunity by his friend and mentor Philip Martiny to work as his assistant on sculpting the many myriad decorations that were to adorn the structures and grounds of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Exposition was set to open in 1892 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' voyage, but construction fell behind and the opening of the White City was pushed out to July 1, 1893.

Here's where an amusing and amazing event occurred. Buffalo Bill Cody, of the famous Wild West Show, had recently returned from a tour of Europe that was a smash hit. Queen Victoria came out of her long period of mourning for a command performance. Two of his Indian warriors challenged each other to climb the then-new Eiffel Tower, making the newspapers worldwide. Coming off of this success and wanting to be part of the next world's largest party, Cody sent his managing partner Nate Salsbury to Chicago to discuss bringing the Wild West Show to the Exhibition. The partners who were financing the Exhibition insisted on taking fully one half of the gross receipts - they really didn't want Cody's "low entertainment" to be a part of their White City. Cody, as one can imagine, turned down that offer flat.

That's when he did something amazing, almost out of spite. He sent Nate Salsbury back to Chicago to rent the land next to the Exposition grounds, immediately outside the gate and close to the train depot. On those fifteen acres, Cody opened his Show a full month BEFORE the Exposition, on June 1. He brought with him 97 paid Sioux Indian performers and another 100 Sioux as his guests, for whom he paid their way as well. The workers who were building the White City would spend their breaks and lunches at the Wild West show.

Hermon MacNeil was no exception. He became, like his fellow European sculptors Prince Paolo Troubetzkoy, Carl Kauba, Franz Xaver Bergmann and others before him, enthralled with the athletic, colorful and frankly exotic Indians. MacNeil spent many an hour at the Wild West Show's Indian encampment, getting to know the performers and making many sketches in his notebooks.

One of the Lakota Sioux at the Wild West Show who spoke, read and wrote English was 15-year-old Joseph Black Pipe (March 7, 1878 - sometime between 1935 and 1940). He had been educated at the St. Francis Catholic Mission on the Rosebud Reservation, but aside from his presence at the Wild West Show, it is not known if he acted in the show's dramas. It is very likely, however, that he acted as an interpreter for the older Lakota chiefs and warriors. One thing is certain, he made the acquaintance of Hermon Atkins MacNeil.

After the Exhibition closed on October 31, 1893, the Wild West Show closed one day later, on November 1. Not long after, MacNeil was walking down a street on a cold, wet Chicago winter day when he spotted young Black Pipe. Joseph had stayed behind after the show closed but was cold and hungry, being without work. MacNeil offered him room and board in his studio in exchange for Black Pipe becoming his studio assistant and model. He gratefully accepted, staying with MacNeil for the next year and a half.

As soon as their first meal was eaten, MacNeil sat his athletic young warrior down and sculpted his face as a three-dimensional plaque (I have been repeatedly outbid in several auctions for one of these rare plaques but have finally brought one home - see the next post). In a spate of inspiration, MacNeil proceeded to use Black Pipe as his model for just about everything that he sculpted for the next couple years. In the summer of 1895, Black Pipe returned to South Dakota. Hermon MacNeil married in December of 1895 and traveled to Rome where he studied for the next four years as the winner of the Prix de Rome Rinehart scholarship, apparently losing contact with his former model and assistant but continuing to both sculpt new works using Black Pipe as his model as well as refine the earlier ones. Many of MacNeil's in-studio photographs of the young Lakota in various poses, removed from his College Point studio after his passing, still exist in the Archive of American Art as administered by the Smithsonian.

Primitive Chant to the Great Spirit was one of these Chicago sculptures. First modeled in plaster in 1894 and titled Primitive Indian Music, one of the first bronzes was cast by Winslow Brothers Foundry in Chicago for placement in foundry owner William Winslow's new house, the first openly designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in his new Prairie Style. It was placed immediately inside the front door, on a pillar in front of the imposing inglenook, and the photograph taken at the time of the opening of the house with the bronze prominently displayed still exists. By 1909 however, this casting was being offered for sale at Chicago's McClurg & Co. bookstore, which also sold Fine Art. In a letter to MacNeil in December of 1909, Bryan Lathrop, who had been one of the financiers behind both the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition as well as Chicago's Marquette building and was an early acquaintance of the artist, not to mention being a strident art collector himself, mentioned that he had left money down on what he had been told was the only copy that existed and that the plaster model and molds had been destroyed. Lathrop inquired if this was true (I'm sure this was true for "Primitive Indian Music," but clearly not for the finished model "Primitive Chant"). I'm not sure if he completed the purchase and it passed out of his hands after his sudden death in 1916 or if he just got his deposit back, but he mentioned in the same letter that he had MacNeil's "Navaho Orator" set aside as well. As both sculptures (if not for sure these specifically) were known to have been in the collection of Frank Lloyd Wright, who abandoned his family and ran off with his mistress in 1909, the timing fits.

How an Illinois artist named Eda Lord came to own it is not known, though given her status in society, she probably saw "Primitive Indian Music" at Winslow House during one of the many high society parties held there in the time around when the house was completed. "Primitive Indian Music" was offered for sale at auction in 2018, sold by the great-grandson of Eda Lord who had it by descent.

Primitive Chant, as it was soon re-titled, went on to become one of MacNeil's first popular sculptures. Around a dozen to two dozen were cast during MacNeil's lifetime, the first by Winslow Brothers then later by Roman Bronze Works in New York. I'm still working on the final count.

This casting, my copy, was made by Roman Bronze Works most likely in 1910 or 1911. It has an unusual 1909 copyright date on it, while most cast by RBW either show no date or are copyright 1901. Records from RBW indicate that two were cast in 1910 and one in 1911. It is my firm belief that MacNeil modeled the sculpture twice, first in Chicago and again in Rome. There are some small but pretty significant differences in the bronzes. Mine more closely resembles the earlier model but is more finely finished than "Primitive Indian Music." I'm still trying to put all of the bronzes into a timeline. It's difficult.

One other thing to keep in mind is that art bronzes were generally made to order back then and were bespoke, meaning if a client wanted a change made, a bit of extra cash on top usually got the job done. Foundry workers also were not above re-creating damaged details or adding new ones when preparing the waxes for molding. Now, Roman Bronze Works was also not above creating "spurious" or off-the-books castings (meaning they used the plaster model and/or molds but didn't tell or pay the artists) for their clients and contemporary reports mention that Winslow Brothers Co. cast only one in bronze, so the true number of lifetime castings may never be known.

None of the lifetime castings were either dated by the foundries nor were they numbered sequentially, though the castings from RBW that were numbered in a closed edition were, I believe, cast posthumously for MacNeil's second wife and son. Those bronzes are also marked "Cire Perdue Cast" so are easy to identify. I do not have a provenance for mine, the person who sold me this bronze had bought it fifteen years earlier from an online dealer, so I do not know who was the original purchaser or when it was purchased. The auction house that I suspect may have sold it in 1988 lost all of their records in a disastrous fire in 1990. Research is ongoing, but I may have hit a proverbial firewall. Most of the other lifetime (of H. A. MacNeil that is) castings of Primitive Chant are owned by museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa (they have two!) and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. No matter the provenance, I'm in rarified company!

Here we have a bronze statue of an athletic sixteen year old Lakota youth. The sculpture stands approximately 24.5" tall and has been deemed period authentic by a couple experts. He is wearing a loincloth with just a fringe of a front flap and no rear flap (some have a rear flap, but like the 1894 original, mine doesn't), low moccasins and two upright feathers in his hair (many of the bronzes have one feather curled over, mine is closer to the 1894 original). He is dancing sinuously with his right foot raised to his own music which he makes by blowing into the crook of his right elbow. The sculpting is fantastic, a beautiful example from a master sculptor of the Beaux Arts era. The bronze is in magnificent condition, especially considering its age. There are no dents or bent parts, only a couple light scratches in the patina commensurate with age. These will "heal" over time to an extent as the bronze further ages. I have cleaned and waxed him, removing the interstitial dirt and sealing the surface from the elements.

I present to you Hermon Atkins MacNeil's 1894 masterpiece, Primitive Chant to the Great Spirit. New pictures will follow after I put together a new backdrop, but for now, Black Pipe dances in my back yard, dappled in sunlight. Enjoy! I know I do.