A.D.M. COOPER (1856-1924)

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, A.D.M. Cooper was the great-great-nephew of William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and the grandson of Benjamin O’Fallon, the well-known patron of early frontier artist George Catlin. Catlin's work and his stories of the West influenced Cooper's own artistic vision, as he developed a romantic painting style in his depictions of the West and Native American subjects. In the 1890s, he began experimenting with the trompe-l'oeil technique and produced a series of still lifes featuring a buffalo head as the central element with Indian accoutrements and photographs "mounted" around it. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody collected several of these works including Relics of the Past (1903, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming), as several works, probably including the present example, depict Indians Cooper likely observed in Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows.