Additional Images

Provenance:

Waddington's Auctioneers, The Mulholland Collection, Toronto, ON, Mar 1982, lot 37;
The Pagurian Collection, Toronto, ON;
Collection of Sir Christopher and Lady Ondaatje

Literature:

Joan Murray, The Last Buffalo: The Story of Frederick Verner, Painter of the Canadian West (Toronto: Pagurian Press, 1984), 152, repro. col.

Note:

By the time this painting was made, Verner had been away from Canada for forty years. With reference to this painting, Joan Murray notes that “even in 1920, at the age of eighty-four, Verner was capable of painting well. In choosing to paint Indian subjects he was following a well established convention of his time, but in contrast to the tragic, violent vision of Indians recorded in the work of many American painters, Verner painted tranquil scenes in harmony with nature.” (1)

In previous years, Verner had worked extensively on his ever-popular buffalo scenes, but by 1920, his interest drifted back to the paintings he had most enjoyed making when he was in his physical prime—his scenes of First Nations people. Murray mentions the artist’s loneliness during the end of his life—his wife had passed away in 1906—and it is easy to view “Sioux Indians Gambling” through Verner’s eyes: not as a portrait of vice, but as a portrait of community and conviviality. Perhaps Verner was envisaging himself among his subjects, among imagined friends, back in the wide-open landscape that so captivated him as both painter and traveller in his youth.

(1) Joan Murray, The Last Buffalo: The Story of Frederick Arthur Verner, Painter of the Canadian West. (Toronto: Pagurian Press, 1984), 152.