Fraser, James Earle (1876-1953)
Return to Images
- James Earle Fraser's The End of the Trail, along with Remington's The Bronco Blister and Dallin's Appeal to the Great Spirit, is among the most memorable images in Western American art. Patricia Broder, in her classic survey Bronzes of the American West states, "Probably the most famous sculpture of the American West is The End of the Trail."
- Such recognition for Fraser is even more remarkable when one considers that the artist created his original model for The End of the Trail in the studio of Richard Bock in 1894 when he was just eighteen years old. Later, after studies at the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts and Academy Julien in Paris, Fraser became an assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens before opening his own studio in New York in 1902.
- Fraser's first important commission was a bust of Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 and in 1913 he designed the United States "Buffalo Nickel." Two years later he completed his most memorable work, an heroic size (height: 18 feet) original plaster model of The End of the Trail that was exhibited at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (1915) where it received the Gold Medal. (The original plaster is now permanently displayed at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.) Sources differ concerning the origin of the subject. One quotes a letter dated July 3,1936 (The Fraser Collection, Syracuse University) from Fraser to Kenneth Miller of the Museum of the American Indian where he writes, "There was no special Indian connected with the statue but the lndian that I knew was Sioux." Another report quotes Fraser at the dedication of a life-size cast of The End of the Trail in Waupan, Wisconsin as saying, "the Seneca chief John Big Tree was the model for the Indian, having posed in Coney Island in 1912."