1880s Kiowa Tribe cross. 

Crucifix given by Father Pierre-Jean De Smet to Henry Little John, son of the Sioux chief Sitting Bull in 1868. De Smet was one of the most respected missionaries in the West and was greatly trusted by the Nez Perce and Flathead tribes with whom he worked.

The crucifix is Spanish colonial and comes from Peru.

A ciborium from South America, ca. 1850.  A ciborium is a vessel, originally in the shape of a drinking cup in Ancient Greece and Rome, used to refer to a large covered cup designed to hold hosts for, and after, the Eucharist, thus the equivalent for the bread of the chalice for the wine.

Dr. Pamplin and Collection Manager Chet Orloff working on this piece after its arrival.

Perry studied under Emanuel Leutze (several of whose paintings are held by the Pamplin Collection) in Germany and began his career in New Orleans at the outset of the Civil War.  He painted the well-known Signing of the Ordinance of Secession of Louisiana in 1861 as well as a portrait of  Confederate President Jefferson Davis.  Following the war, he traveled to California and Hawaii, painting portraits and landscapes of the American West and the Hawaiian Islands, ending his career in New York City.  Perry captured many of the iconic geographic scenes of the West and the Pacific Coast in the late 19th century. His work today is held in several of the nation’s largest museums.

Tomaso began his career as a musician and met drummer Dean Cornwell, later one of America’s most accomplished illustrators.  Cornwell encouraged Tomaso to move from the piano to painting and he went on to produce cover and article artwork for The Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, among other magazines and books.  Here he depicts the emotional appeal of a wedding in the early American wilderness. Pilgrims were married in a civil ceremony presided over by the colony’s governor, rather than in a church.

A wonderfully vibrant painting of the Holy Mother, attended by two knights, from the Church of Santa Clara, Ayacucho, Peru, as seen through the perspectives of both the indigenous peoples of the Andes and of Spanish Church figures.  The painting is unattributed, though dates from the mid-19th century, approximately the period during which the church here was constructed. This is a superb illustration of colonial-era religious iconography.

Illustration for a story in The Saturday Evening Post, February 5, 1962. Bama is an American artist known for his realistic paintings and etchings of Western subjects. His work is collected in The Western Art of James Bama (Bantam Books, 1975) and The Art of James Bama (1993). He was inducted into the Illustrator’s Hall of Fame on June 28, 2000. 

Eastman Johnson was one of the nation’s most-prominent 19th century portrait painters, who particularly portrayed literary artists. Eastman was a leader within 19th-century America’s arts community and was a co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Widely recognized for his portraits of such prominent Americans as Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Longfellow, among others, he also re-created such masterpieces as Rubens’ evocative painting of the Madonna and Child.

Beginning his career as a sculptor in Milan, Procaccini’s paintings in the following decades subsequently portrayed his sculptural gifts. His style of tense draftsmanship and deep feeling anticipated the Baroque and brought the Procaccini Academy increasing renown as a source of inspired painting and sculpture, as well as a school for future artists and craftsmen. Upon his death, his nephew Ercole Procaccini the Younger assumed the directorship of the Academy.