Sold by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Oscar Berninghaus was born in St. Louis, Missouri, a home to which he returned throughout his life while becoming an acclaimed painter and illustrator of the American Southwest. He first visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1899, while working for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad companies as a promotional illustrator. “I stayed here but a week, became infected with the Taos germ and promised myself a longer stay the following year,” he reminisced later. His longer stay included spending almost every summer in Taos for the rest of his career, wintering in St. Louis and painting in both locations. In addition to the subject matter, Berninghaus credited the special light of Taos for turning his attentions beyond commercial illustration to fine art. Trained in a printing shop, Berninghaus had mastered watercolor, ink, and other illustrator’s media at an early age. After his visit to Taos, he began working seriously in oil, and in the following year he had his first solo show, in St. Louis. His early trips to Taos put him in touch with the developing artist colony there, including Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, who had established studios in Taos in the 1890s. Many of the other artists that gathered in the Southwest had studied in Europe, but in this, Berninghaus was an outlier. His education was mainly confined to night study at Washington University in St. Louis in 1899, but he picked up the rudiments of the impressionism and early modernism from his European-trained peers in Taos. In 1915, Berninghaus helped found the Taos Society of Artists, along with Blumenschein, Phillips, E. Irving Couse, Buck Dunton, and Joseph Henry Sharp. The Society showed together for the following decade.

The present work was painted in the first stretch of Berninghaus’s career, after his 1899 decision to commit fully to painting in oil, and certainly sometime before it was exhibited in 1913. It was first exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of an exhibition by the Society of Western Artists. Berninghaus was not a founding member of the Society of Western Artists, but showed in their annual exhibitions almost every year starting in 1907. By 1913 the Society had chapters in Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. The bulletin for the 18th annual exhibition identifies the St. Louis Chapter as “the strategic point in education in the Southern West,” as the working home to “artists in many Western cities, including New Orleans, Denver, Dallas, and Los Angeles” [Eighteenth Annual Exhibition of the Society of Western Artists (1913), series 1913, no. 19, p. 9]. Its “strategic point” made St. Louis an attractive home-base for Berninghaus, whose further associations with advanced painters in Taos complemented his unique flavor of bright, thickly-painted Western scenes.