Ernest Leonard Blumenschein

Ernest Leonard Blumenschein 1874-1960, an American artist, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up in Dayton, Ohio, where he was initially trained as a violinist. Turning from music to art, he studied in New York City and in Paris. He was a well-known illustrator for popular magazines, having illustrated, for example, two short stories by Jack London. In 1897, during a Western trip, his horse-drawn wagon threw a wheel and he carried the wheel, for repairs, to the nearest town, which happened to be Taos, in the territory of New Mexico -- as of then not even one of the states of the United States. He was immediately struck by the possibilities for his art offered by the sweeping landscapes and the diverse Native American, Spanish-American, and American cultures of the region, and determined then and there to work as a serious painter. He was a cofounder of the Taos Society of Artists and part of the Taos art colony which from 1898 was an important part of the life of Taos, New Mexico. The style of painting of the Taos painters was to decisively influence the perceptions that the wider world came to have of the American Southwest, and specifically, of the Pueblo and Navajo Indian peoples.