Hermon Atkins MacNeil (1866-1947)

The present work is a reduction of a monumental sculpture entitled The Coming of the White Man, commissioned for the city of Portland, Oregon, by David P. Thompson, a local businessman and public official, in preparation for the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905. The original work consisted of two figures, a chief and a medicine man, members of the Multnomah Tribe who look east at the arrival of the first white settlers. The stoic and dignified chief was so admired that by 1905, MacNeil had authorized the Roman Bronze Works in New York to cast reductions of the figure. According to Donna J. Hassler, “MacNeil told the Metropolitan Museum in 1939 that at least a dozen examples were cast in bronze; foundry records from the Roman Bronze Works indicate that more than twenty were produced beginning in 1903.” (American Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2, New York, 2001, p. 481). In creating the sculpture, MacNeil made sure to tend to the ethnographic accuracy of the figures. In his reduction of the chief, the sculptor added a headdress, a bow and a quiver of arrows, features that enhance the strength of the chief and emphasize his “defiant resolve.” (T. Tolles, T.B. Smith, The American West in Bronze, New Haven, Connecticut, 2013, p. 44)