After E.W. Deming Copper Sculpture "Mutual Surprise"

After Edwin Willard Deming (American, 1860-1942). "Mutual Surprise" copper sculpture, after 1967. Cast posthumously by Excalibur Bronze Foundry. Signed on edge with "EX NY" and foundry mark in one corner. A copper cast after Edwin Willard Deming's "Mutual Surprise," depicting a comic woodland encounter between a bear cub and a snapping turtle. The gawky cub rears upright on a rocky mound, one forepaw lifted, mouth open in a startled grin as it peers down at the small hard-shelled interloper below. Deming, who delighted in modeling bears in moods both fierce and playful, sharpens the humor through contrast: the looming, ungainly cub set against the tiny questioning turtle with its beak agape. The mottled green and brown patina catches the muscular modeling of the fur and the pebbled ground. Raised on a green stone plinth. The work is signed along the edge "EX NY" with a foundry mark to one corner, a posthumous cast by the Excalibur Bronze Foundry. About the artist: Edwin Willard Deming (1860-1942) was an American painter, muralist, illustrator, and sculptor best known for his genre depictions of Native American life and wild animals, particularly among the Blackfeet, Crow, and Sioux. Born in Ashland, Ohio, Deming was raised from infancy in western Illinois, where his family relocated amid the upheavals of the Civil War era. The frontier character of the region, where Winnebago families were sometimes neighbors, shaped an early fascination with Native life that hardened into vocation. As a teenager he traveled to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, sketching extensively, and returned east determined to become, in his own phrase, a painter of Indians. He trained formally at the Art Students League of New York, then spent a year (1884-85) at the Academie Julian in Paris under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. Back in the United States, he spent two years painting cycloramas, the panoramic canvases mounted inside cylindrical viewing halls that were a popular entertainment of the day, before turning his attention west. Beginning in 1887 he painted among the Apache and Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, and in 1890 traveled with fellow artist DeCost Smith on further expeditions. His work repeatedly took him to Blackfeet, Crow, and Sioux territory, as well as Arizona and New Mexico, producing both paintings and photographic documentation, including images of the buffalo dance at San Ildefonso, New Mexico. Deming married Therese Osterheld of Yonkers, New York, in 1892; the couple had six children. After 1900 he turned increasingly to sculpture while also producing a series of romantic murals of Indian life, later installed at the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of the American Indian in New York. One of these murals was subsequently adapted for use on a U.S. postage stamp. He was also known, evidently among the communities he painted, by the names Man-Afraid-of-His-Name and Eight Bears. Deming died on October 15, 1942, in New York City. Item # 204201

Estimation:€311.46

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