INSCRIBED BY RENOWNED WESTERN ARTIST CHARLES SCHREYVOGEL, FIRST EDITION OF MY BUNKIE AND OTHERS, WITH 36 LARGE PLATES OF PAINTINGS BY “THIS PAINTER OF LIFE ON THE WESTERN FRONTIER”

SCHREYVOGEL, Charles. My Bunkie and Others. Pictures of Western Frontier Life. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909. Large oblong folio (12 by 17 inches), original half orange cloth, pictorial paper boards. $1850.

First edition of an important early collection of 36 splendid exhibition-size plates from original paintings by award-winning Western artist Schreyvogel, including his famed “My Bunkie” and the controversial “Custer’s Demand,” inscribed by him on the title page, “To Louis E. Cook, With compliments of Chas Schreyvogel, May 9th, /11.”

Befriended by “Buffalo Bill” Cody, in 1893 Schreyvogel made his first trip to the West, staying at a Ute Indian Reservation in where he spent five months sketching and collecting Native American and cavalry artifacts. In 1899 his groundbreaking painting, My Bunkie, won the Thomas B. Clarke Award at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, as well as awards at the Paris and Pan-American Expositions. In 1902 “Schreyvogel began painting the controversial Custer’s Demand, which was rooted in his fascination with Fort Abraham Lincoln, the origin of Custer’s fateful expedition against the Sioux.” The painting won the St. Louis World’s Fair Exposition Bronze Medal, and in 1904 President Theodore Roosevel, impressed with Schreyvogel’s artistry, “gave him a permit to visit any Army post or Indian Reservation in pursuit of his research, whereupon he traveled to the Ute, Sioux and Crow Reservations, and was witness to a grand council of more than 10,000 Crow, Blackfeet, Sioux and Chippewa Indians held at the Standing Rock Reservation” (National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum). In a 1910 letter from the editor of Leslie’s Weekly, Schreyvogel was declared successor to Frederic Remington. With 36 large brown-tone photogravure plates after original paintings by Schreyvogel; without rarely found original box. The original painting of My Bunkie is in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Howes S199.

Text and plates fresh and clean, minimal foxing to initial blank, some edge-wear, soiling to boards. An extremely good copy, scarce inscribed.