A Cherokee Warrior Kneels Before a Forest Wolf — Print & Oil Painting

The background is one colour and no more. A wall of yellow foliage fills the entire frame behind both figures, laid on thick and worked wet, broken only by two or three dark trunks and a scatter of deeper orange near the top. There is no sky, no distance, and no way of telling how far back the wood goes.

The animal is doing the approaching. It stands at the right with its front legs planted, the head lowered and pushed forward, ears half back, the eyes fixed on the man, and its winter coat is painted in grey, cream and dark brown with real weight in the ruff and the shoulder. Every line of it leans towards the left of the picture.

He holds still. Down on one knee at the left, the near arm laid along his thigh, layered fringed hide over a panel patterned in red and green, strands of beads at the throat, two feathers set upright behind one ear, and a broad red stripe painted across the eyes and the bridge of the nose. His hands are open and low, and his weight is back.

Small things are placed along the bottom edge and reward looking. A single white feather lies on the bare earth at the lower left, a scatter of pale sticks crosses in front of his knee, and a shallow vessel sits half in shadow beside him. They are the only objects in the picture that belong to neither figure.

What makes the composition unusual is the direction of the movement: the wolf comes forward and the man waits, which is the reverse of how this pairing is normally staged. Filed in our Amerindian collection, beside the meeting held open across a gap of lit grass.