James Fraser is said to have lived in a boxcar as a young child, sleeping on the floor in bison skins and learning to make arrowheads from neighboring Sioux children. At age 15, he ventured far from his childhood to attend art school in Chicago and in Paris, France.
 
Back in the United States, Fraser lived in Connecticut and created sculptures for government buildings in Washington D.C. He served in Washington on the Fine Arts Commission and was a member of the prestigious National Institute of Arts and Letters, founded in 1904.
 
As the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York says about French-trained artists depicting western subjects, Fraser expressed himself in art as both "American, through [his] choice of themes, and as modern, through [his] command of current aesthetics.”
 
Continue reading to look at what this means. 
 
In this sculpture, we see a familiar theme of horses in the open outdoors; however, we can notice the style or aesthetics Fraser used is a little abstract. We recognize these shapes as horses, but the surface of a horse's body does not look like this, even in a storm.
 
In Paris, Fraser apprenticed with the well-known American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Saint-Gaudens was also trained in France and worked in the realistic figurative style of the day. However, instead of finding inspiration in the idealism of ancient Greece and Rome taught by tradition, Saint-Gaudens looked to the Renaissance for a depth of emotion and a truth to the individualism of the people he portrayed. 
 
Also in Paris, Fraser likely would have encountered the work of another famous sculptor, Auguste Rodin. Rodin, a native of France, is known for revolutionizing sculpture. Like his American counterpart, Rodin also looked to the Renaissance. He focused on expressing the human body as living and holding all the emotions and memories that are the marks of one's life experience. In his quest to express modern life, Rodin gave his surfaces active hollows and mounds.
 
We can imagine these desires to express the realities and emotions of life resonated with Fraser's childhood in South Dakota. In this sculpture's surface texture and in the horses' postures, we can almost feel the storm winds battering them as they huddle together.

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