George Armstrong Custer Poster

This painting of George Armstrong Custer was started by me as a college art project back in the 1980s and I have been fiddling with it ever since. Changing and reworking it over the years. This is its most recent incarnation. George Armstrong Custer is probably one of the most famous historical figures to come out of both the American Civil War and the Old West. Vainglorious and fearless in battle he seems to have been stamped in the same mould as many other noted military leaders such Patton, Rommel, McArthur and Montgomery. Fraught with contradictions he relentlessly pursued his campaigns against Native Americans and was all but court-martialed from exposing the corruption in President Grant’s Indian Bureau. This painting features a portrait inspired by Matthew Brady’s famous photograph taken during the Civil War. It also depicts the swallow-tailed U.S. Cavalry guidon of the type used during the Plains Indian Wars and a partial map of the Little Bighorn battlefield.