Painting by Edwin Willard Deming(American 1860-1942), Flute Player,circa 1925.

Frame: 26 3/4" x 30 1/2"
Painting: 18 1/2" x 22 1/4"

Painting: 22"x 18", oil on board

Davids notes: Lot 94 is probably the finest American painting of the Indian world in the Old West ever offered by David Killen Gallery. Not only was Deming a master at depicting the realism and beauty of the Native American world, he also captured the mysterious beauty of their beliefs and practices, as in Flute Player. The young brave is surrounded by wolves and bears that are enchanted by his music, as he walks in the mist of a lake path.

The quality is astonishingly lifelike. A great work of art transports you to another time and place, and this painting does that job. You feel like you are in another world, with animals so lifelike you can touch them, and feel their thick fur.Some of the wonderful detail is the painting of the wolf face on the cloth that the boy wears,and the morning sunlight reflecting off the edge of the wolves faces and back.The entire work is museum quality and condition.

Edwin Willard Deming
The following information about Deming is from the Smithsonian Museum: Edwin Willard Deming was a painter and sculptor. When he was still an infant, Deming’s family moved from his birthplace in Ashland, Ohio, to western Illinois, an area that during those pre-and post-Civil War years retained a frontier character, and where roaming Winnebago Indians were sometimes neighbors. While still in his teens, Deming traveled to Indian territory in Oklahoma and sketched extensively. Determined to become a painter of Indians, he enrolled at the Art Students League, then spent a year at the Académie Julian in Paris (1884-85), studying under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. Back in the United States, he worked the next two years painting cycloramas. In 1887 Deming first visited and painted the Apaches and Pueblos of the Southwest. His active career of painting and illustrating took him repeatedly to the lands of the Blackfoot, Crow, and Sioux, as well as to Arizona and New Mexico. After the turn of the century, Deming devoted more time to sculpture but also began work on a series of romantic murals of Indian life, which were subsequently installed in the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of the American Indian in New York.

Great condition overall