Paul Manship’s academic career commenced at the St. Paul School of Art in Minnesota. At the age of nineteen, he moved to Philadelphia to continue his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Manship later relocated to New York, where he enrolled at the Art Students League. He also served as an assistant to Solon Borglum, a sculptor of Western themes, from whom he gained knowledge of animal anatomy. Manship won the coveted Prix de Rome and a fellowship to study for three years at the American Academy of Rome. It was at this time that he developed an interest in classical and archaic Greek art. Upon returning to America, these combined influences resulted in a style attractive to both modernists and conservatives in its simplification of line and detail. He created a number of sculptures characterized by a stylized form that was uniquely his own. Manship’s oeuvre includes over 700 works.

Manship energized the static, ideal forms he derived from antiquity with the controlled power and rhythmic patterns of the machine age. In the Indian Hunter his enthusiasm for Archaic Greek statuary appears in the articulation of shapes, emphasis on profile and linearity. Sculptures such as this one broke with the exuberant naturalism of the Beaux-Arts tradition practiced by Frederick MacMonnies and others.

Rathner, Susan. Archaism, Modernism, and the Art of Paul Manship. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.