John Mulvany

[4] Mulvany also recorded the American Civil War on canvas as well as maintaining a career as a portrait painter throughout his life.

[8] He worked as a tow boy on the Erie Canal and came to the attention of Professor Juan Wandersford at the National Academy of Design in New York City.

[18] Mulvany found a patron in St. Louis, Samuel B. Coale, who provided terms for him to study in Europe[19] where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

[22] Over the next five years Mulvany worked in Eldon, Iowa; St Louis, Missouri; Denver, Colorado; and Louisville, Kentucky, painting portraits and western genre pictures.

In 1876 when news of General George Custer's fatal defeat by the Sioux Indians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn reached the East, Mulvany immediately recognized the significance of this event and headed west to Montana to capture it on canvas.

[27] Over the next four years, he made two trips to the battle site and set up a studio in Cincinnati, Salida, Denver and then in Kansas City.,[28] Mulvany's large masterpiece, the 11ftx20ft Custer’s Last Rally, 1881, began its seventeen-year coast-to-coast tour of the country before H. J. Heinz took over ownership in 1898.

[31] This painting was presumed lost until it was offered for sale on eBay in 2010 by a dealer who thought it represented an American battle scene, purchased by an Irish art gallery, exhibited in Dublin and subsequently sold.

He narrowly escaped imprisonment by the authorities while researching uniforms for his Aughrim painting at the Tower of London just days before it was bombed in the Fenian dynamite campaign in 1885.

He not only influenced William Merritt Chase[55] and Frederic Remington,[56] he also brought an international perspective to American Western Art.