One of Peter Moran’s most eloquent New Mexico prints, this piece depicts the traditional Native American threshing technique in which horses were utilized. An Englishman by birth, Moran was the first non-native American to portray aspects of the life of Pueblo Indians.

The younger brother of Thomas Moran, Peter Moran was a painter-etcher best known for his Romantic sensibility and landscape compositions incorporating animals. The Moran family immigrated to the United States in 1844, when Peter was three. He began his artistic career as an apprentice to a lithographic firm and eventually studied painting with his brothers Edward and Thomas. He was influenced by the animal paintings of Rosa Bonheur and Constant Troyon and visited England in 1863 to see those of Edwin Landseer.

Moran took up etching in 1874, using that medium to record genre scenes that he observed while traveling in New Mexico and Arizona in 1881 on an ethnographic expedition to study Pueblo Indian culture. The print offered here likely results from that expedition. He returned to the Southwest in 1890 as an artist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

This is a superb example of Moran’s record of a vanishing way of life and rare in this edition, signed and on thin laid japan paper.