Appeal to the Great Spirit by Dallin in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2022

Title: Appeal to the Great Spirit

Artist: Cyrus Edwin Dallin (Springville, Utah 1861–1944 Arlington Heights, Massachusetts)

Date: 1913; cast ca. 1916

Culture: American

Medium: Bronze

Dimensions: 21 3/8 × 14 1/2 × 21 3/4 in. (54.3 × 36.8 × 55.2 cm)

Credit Line: Purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and Jonathan L. Cohen and Allison B. Morrow Gift, 2013

Accession Number: 2013.441

"Appeal to the Great Spirit" presents a Native man on horseback wearing a feathered headdress, his head raised and arms outspread in communion with a divine power. More than 400 authorized bronze statuettes were cast in three different sizes, testament to the popularity of sculptures depicting prevailing Euro-American visions of a "vanishing race." Today, such objects represent the complicated, painful legacies surrounding falsehoods about the decline and erasure of Indigenous peoples.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/21714