Lot 125: [Custer, George Armstrong]

"Custer's Last Fight." Milwaukee: Milwaukee Lithographic and Engraving Company for the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Assocation, [1896] Chromolithographed broadsheet (31 ½ x 41 ¾ in.; 800 x 1060 mm) after Cassilly Adams and F. Otto Becker; light toning and soiling at edges, margins reinforced, a few neatly closed tears and restoration in background. Floated, glazed, and framed.

"Custer's Last Fight" was originally painted on a wagon canvas by Cassilly Adams in 1884, eight years after the battle, but in 1889 Adolphus Busch employed the Milwaukee Lithographing Company to make prints of Adams's painting as part of an advertising campaign. F. Otto Becker, an employee of the lithographer, was hired by Busch to make a master painting of "Custer's Last Fight," from the which the famous advertising lithograph was ultimately created. Adams's painting was presented by Busch to the United States Cavalry's Seventh Regiment to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the infamous Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1896; it was found badly damaged at Fort Bliss in the 1930s and later was destroyed by a fire in the officers' mess. In 1896 Milwaukee Lithographic Company used the Becker painting to create lithographic plates, but had to cut it into eight sections so that a number of artists can make the intricate color plates at the same time. Becker reassembled his painting in the 1930s and sold it to the Anheuser-Busch Company.