Another artist to paint the same sort of subject with distinguished success is Ernest L. Blumenschein (1874-), who began as an illustrator, and after work at portraiture became interested in the life of the Indian. He too went some years ago to Taos, where quite a colony of painters assembled. His first important picture to attract attention was his “Wiseman, Warrior, and Youth,” a group of three characteristic red men. Both Mr. Couse and Mr. Blumenschein may be said to represent the “tame” Indian; for all their canvases depict the savages at peaceful occupations.
W. Herbert Dunton is still another of the Taos colony, where he paints much of the year; though he gives attention to illustrative work as well. He has seized upon the characteristics of the Indian with artistic fidelity.
E. IRVING COUSE
In His Studio
In a similar manner N. C. Wyeth, both in painting and in illustrative work, has been no less successful. Mr. Wyeth was a pupil of the late Howard Pyle, whose influence is felt strongly in his work.
Other pupils of that noted illustrator have attained distinctive positions in portraying varied forms of Western life. The legends and traditions of the Indian have attracted Remington Schuyler. The pictorial aspect of his active life in the open, together with his contact with wild animal life, has supplied subjects for Philip Goodwin; while the life of the frontiersman and the pioneer has inspired the sturdy work of Allen True and Harvey Dunn. These five men have pictured the West in the same large spirit in which their master worked in rendering the buccaneers of the sea and the continental soldier. Most of the painters of the West have been illustrators first and painters later.
At Cody, Wyoming, for a large part of the year lives William R. Leigh. He was born in West Virginia in 1866. He was a pupil of the Munich art schools, and received medals in Paris. He has painted much of the West that has passed,—of Indian and soldier, of settler and cowboy, of some of the battles of the ’60’s between the United States troops and the savages,—and has given some of the wonderful landscape backgrounds, devoting no less attention to the extraordinary local color than to the figure.
THE HOUSE OF E. IRVING COUSE