Arthur Burdett Frost (1851-1928) Sawney with his Long Rifle

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The Sporting Sale 2019

By Copley Fine Art Auctions

Jul 25, 2019

Set Reminder 2019-07-25 10:00:00 2019-07-25 10:00:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : The Sporting Sale 2019 https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/copley/the-sporting-sale-2019-4227
July 25 at 10 am | 550 lots Copley Fine Art Auctions cinnie@copleyart.com

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• Lot Description
  Arthur Burdett Frost (1851-1928)
  Sawney with his Long Rifle, c. 1895
  signed "A. B. Frost" lower right
  watercolor and gouache, 12 by 7 in.
  
  Will Ryan, an outdoorsman and writer and editor for "Gray’s Sporting Journal," selected the story "Sawney’s Deer Lick" for inclusion in his 2013 history of hunting and fishing in America. Written by Charles D. Lanier and illustrated by Frost for Scribner’s in 1895, the story follows a narrator and his guide.
  
  Ryan prefaces, "If the story of the most dangerous big game is about leaving home, the story about the most treasured big game, the white-tailed deer, is about finding it…The remote woods of the northern Midwest, Maine, the central Adirondacks, western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia were the only regions in the country capable of hosting a deer season in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not surprisingly, most of the white-tailed deer stories from the 1890s came from those regions. City hunters relied on guides or locals with inside information to assist them in the hunting, as is the case in 'Sawney’s Deer Lick.'"
  
  Ryan continues, "The narrator and his longtime guide were on one of their Allegheny big game hunts when they stopped for a break. ‘I’ve killed some 37 deer from this spring,’ said Sawney Moore, the lanky mountaineer guide, standing ‘with hands clasped over the muzzle of the old mountain rifle, which was long enough to act as a comfortable support for his chin.’"
  
  "In all likelihood, Scribner’s readers read the stillness and purity of nature and the mountain’s tabernacle woodland with a religious frame of mind. In many ways, this was a story author Lanier was born to tell. He was the eldest son of Sidney Lanier…The younger Lanier spent considerable time in the uplands of the Alleghenies and witnessed his father’s effort at healing through love of the land. By seventeen, Charles was a skilled outdoorsman. After college he moved to New York, where he worked on Wall Street and at the American Review of Reviews and also wrote stories for Scribner’s."
  
  This work, depicting an eccentric and accomplished mountain guide at one with his surroundings, conjures a specific moment in the history of hunting in America.
  
  Provenance: Henry M. Reed Collection, acquired from Russell Button Gallery, Chicago
  Private Collection, New Jersey, by direct descent in the family from the above
  
  Literature: Charles D. Lanier, "Sawney's Deer Lick," Scribner's Magazine, Jan 1895, p. 100, illustrated.
  Will Ryan, "Gray's Sporting Journal's Noble Birds and Wily Trout: Creating America's Hunting and Fishing Traditions," Guildford, CT, 2013, pp. 133-136.
  
  Exhibited: Montclair, New Jersey, "The World of A. B. Frost: His Family and their Circle," Montclair Art Museum, April 24-June 19, 1983.

  Condition

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