Cassilly Adams

1843 – 1921

Cassilly Adams was born in Zanesville, Ohio, a descendant of American founding father, John Adams. Cassilly’s father, William Apthorp Adams, was a lawyer and amateur artist. Cassilly became interested in art early on and eventually enrolled at the Boston Academy of Arts and later at the Cincinnati Art School. However, the Civil War interrupted his pursuit of a career in art while he served in the U.S. Army and was wounded at the Battle of Vicksburg while aboard the U.S.S. Osage.

By the late 1870s, Adams was living in St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked as an artist and engraver. Adams apparently painted many scenes of frontier life. One of the books he is known to have illustrated is Conquering the Wilderness by Frank Triplett, published in 1883. However, most of his illustrations were done for book publishers who did not credit him, and thus he was a relatively unknown artist during his lifetime.

Adams is best known for Custer’s Last Fight, an epic painting over 16 feet long and nine feet high, completed in 1885. The painting took a year to complete as Adams posed Cavalrymen in uniform and Sioux Indians in period-correct costumes for the painting.

The painting was produced for a pair of St. Louis Arts Club members, who briefly exhibited it around the country, charging a fifty-cent admission fee. However, when they didn’t produce the income they had hoped for from the exhibition of the painting, the owners sold the painting to a St. Louis saloonkeeper who hung it in his saloon, which promptly went bankrupt and the painting was acquired by one of its creditors in 1886, the Anheuser-Busch Company. At the time the painting was valued at $10,000. Over the years, the Anheuser-Busch Company made thousands of reproductions of the painting, which were used for advertising and promotion in saloons and taverns nationwide. In fact, more than 150,000 copies of the painting have been produced since 1885, making it a very well-known painting.

Eventually, Anheuser-Busch gave the original paintings of Custer’s Last Fight to the 7th Cavalry, which owned it until it was lost in a fire at Fort Bliss, Texas in 1946. Since then, only copies of the famous painting exist for posterity to appreciate. One of those copies, a lithograph, appeared in a barroom scene of the 1950 movie The Gunfighter with Gregory Peck.

Cassilly Adams died in 1921 at Trader's Point near Indianapolis, Indiana, where he owned eight-plus acres at the confluence of the Fishback and Eagle Creeks.

BACK FROM THE HUNT Watercolor and Gouache on Paper 10 ¼ x 14 ¾ inches