Coeur d'Alene Art Auction - July 2021

– 203 – 255 Z. S. Liang (b. 1953) Joe Kipp, Trader, Missouri River, 1879 (2013) oil on canvas 44 × 68 inches signed lower right: Z. S. Liang VERSO Signed, titled, and dated Label, Autry Museum of the AmericanWest, Los Angeles, California Of the painting artist Tom Saubert wrote, “From his birth in a Mandan village in 1849, the son of an American Fur Company father and a Mandan mother, Joseph Kipp would go on for sixty-four years to lead one of the most extraordinary lives of travel, trade and adventure ever documented in the annals of Western history’s fur trade period. His friends called him ‘Raven Quiver’ and they were many and diverse, whether soled in moccasins or boots. Among this kindred retinue were Indian chiefs and warriors, trappers, merchant traders, French voyageurs, Canadian Mounties, soldiers, buffalo hunters and bull whackers, mixed-bloods, lawmen, priests and preachers. All these colorful characters populated his wide world which revolved around the Indian trade on the Upper Missouri frontier from 1866 until it ended in 1881. Joe Kipp was a man of singular reputation known as a firm, honest, and generous trader, highly respected by Indian and white alike. In the fall of 1878, Kipp agreed to ‘camp-trade’ with the Piegan bands north of the Missouri River at the foot of the Bear PawMountains, and here the scene unfolds in the artist’s painting.” EXHIBITED Masters of the AmericanWest , Autry Museum of the AmericanWest, Los Angeles, California, 2014 LITERATURE Masters of the AmericanWest , Autry Museum of the AmericanWest, 2014, p. 52, illustrated Tom Saubert, Z. S. Liang: Native Trails, Fresh Tracks , GreenwichWorkshop Press, 2014, pp. 46-47, illustrated $60,000–90,000