Herman W. Hansen, Indian Courier, date unknown. Watercolor, 11 1/4 x 15 1/2 inches. Photograph by: Tad Fruits

Inspired by George Catlin’s paintings and James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, The Leatherstocking Tales, Herman Hansen left his native Germany in 1877 determined to seek high adventure in the American West. He had gotten only as far as Chicago when he finally was given the opportunity to visit the Far West. In 1879, a railway company commissioned him to paint one of their locomotives in the Dakota Territory landscape. Hansen recalled it as “a fine locomotive, all decked out with silver, at the extreme end of the line.” Although he knew he could have worked from photographs, he accepted the company’s “absurd” suggestion that he go west to paint the locomotive because he “was young and anxious to see the western country. Once I got there, I stayed until I had made all the studies of Indians and buffalo I wanted.”

Immigrating to America, Hansen spent a brief interlude in New York before moving to Chicago where he worked for several years as a commercial artist while attending the Chicago Art Institute. A business trip to San Francisco in 1882 convinced him to remain there. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his studio, study collections, and many paintings, he moved across the bay to Oakland.

Hansen continued to make summer “field trips” ranging from Montana to the Southwest and down into Mexico. He collected sights, stories, and subjects; nevertheless, if a subject did not involve a horse, it did not become a Hansen painting. He was devoted to portraying the unbridled horsepower of the magnificent beast galloping across the plains, bucking madly above a coiled rattler, or picking its way up a precarious rocky trail. Shortly after Hansen’s death, a California art critic claimed that if he had painted “a canvas which did not hold a horse . . . I have not seen the picture.”

Like Frederic Remington, the legendary Western artist who bitterly deplored the passing of the Old West, Hansen was disillusioned by the rapid changes taking place in the West. He recalled the days when he could walk down the main street of Tucson, Arizona, “all day and every day of the week getting material for pictures, local color and new types.” With the gambling houses shut down and guns banned, he lamented, “Why, the place hasn’t the pictorial value of a copper cent any longer!”