I owned and operated a wildlife art gallery and custom framing shop in the Midwest back in the late 80’s and up until I moved to Florida in 2001 and I carried an artist who was very well known during that era and I am sure is still active in the wildlife art field. His name is Ron Van Gilder and he painted a limited edition collection featuring the typical and non-typical world record bucks in the Boone & Crockett and Pope & Young registries. What made his art rather unique was he would travel to the area where each one of these monster bucks were harvested and he would do a photo shoot of that area in an attempt to place his artistic version of the animal in as much of a natural background of the area in which the animal was taken as was humanly possible. In the case of the Jordan Buck, taken by Jim Jordan back early in the 20th century up in Wisconsin, Van Gilder had the added challenge of sizing the full grown trees on the river bank where the buck crossed before finally dying to represent the young saplings which had probably been there over a half century earlier!
HIs rendition of the “Missouri Giant”, the name he had given his painting of the buck in this article, was supposedly located near an old broken down hedge post fence emptying out of a wooded area into an open field.
His paintings included the buck that finally took the Boone & Crockett top spot for typical trophy rack away from the Jordan Buck. This buck was shot by Milo Hanson during this same time period and I was one of the first galleries to receive the LE art prints of the “Hanson Buck” when it was released by Wild Wings, the MN based publisher of all of Van Gilder’s prints at that time.
One question in my mind as i look at the photos in this article though, there are 4 photos of the Missouri buck in the article. Starting from the beginning of the article, photos 1 and 3 appear to be of the same reproduction of one of the head mounts. Photos 2 and 4 appear to be also of one of the reproduction head mounts. But, if you look closely at photos 2 and 4, one is a complete reversal of the other. Note the direction the mount is looking in both photos, compare the tines on each rack, you will notice that the brow tines, one forked and one single, and all the other tines on the rack are 180 degrees opposite! Somebody apparently Photoshopped the photo and flipped one of the print copies.
Now the odd thing of this all is, when Ron Van Gilder researched a specific animal or game bird, he made the image accurate right down to the number of wing feathers on a typical bird or the curve and placement of the tines on a rack of any game animal he was preparing to paint. I happen to have some colored advertising print cards of the “Missouri Giant” stored in a file cabinet. Yeah, OK, I am also a pack rat when it comes to throwing that sort of stuff out. But the brow tines on Van Gilder’s painting of this non-typical racked buck are in the same configuration as the rack in photo #2! In other words, the forked brow tine on his painting is on the right hand antler of the image of the deer. I would be surprised if Van Gilder had made such an obvious mistake at painting the rack backwards but this means that 3 of the 4 photos of the reproductions of the head mount are wrong! I no longer have Ron’s contact information or I would be placing a phone call to him tomorrow just to touch base with him after almost 20 years since my last meeting with the artist. And the first question would be “Hey, Ron, which antler was the forked brow tine on with that Missouri Giant you painted back in the day??” I may not get another good night’s sleep if I can’t sort this out in my mind!!
If anyone still attends either the MN or MI Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Art Festivals, Ron was always a regular at both shows along with the Hautman brothers, their buddy Bruce Miller, and Marian Anderson, a dear old friend of mine and, hopefully she is still able to get around and paint her wonderful images.
Any help in clearing this up for me will lead to many more nights of restful sleep for a retired picture framer who can’t remember what he did yesterday but has a photographic memory about anything in the wildlife art field and can still back up what he says is fact with proof.
(I KNEW those ad cards would come in handy one day!!) Ha!
