Pancho Villa Portrait

Wallace Smith was a Chicago artist who was asssigned to ride with and document Pancho Villa's rebellion along the Mexican Biorder. In the process Smith did a lot of illustrations and portraits on site as well as filing numerous stories that resulted later in a book and some magazine articles. This is a portrait he did of Villa at an execution. Smith was a contemporary of Ben Hecht and later wrote movies and did other work in Hollywood.

The scene does appear in Smith's book about the Villa era "The Little Tigress" on page 47 though the art is not shown. It is hard to tell if the book is actual reminiscences or short fiction. More research will be done in 2022.

Since Villa's saddle recently sold for 3/4 million dollars I am putting this on the market in case anyone bidding on the saddle would like to own a portrait!!

Note this is quite bit more than the cost of a normal Wallace Smith painting- it's value is that it was painted by someone who knew Villa. One of the few portraits of Villa painted from life