Unlike most of his contemporaries in the Gallup New Deal Art collection, Edgar Alwin Payne was largely self-taught. He left home at the age of fourteen and worked as a sign painter, house painter, scenic painter, muralist, and portraitist in the South, Midwest, and Mexico. In 1907, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago but left after only two weeks. In 1909, he made his first visit to California, where he met his future wife, Elsie Palmer, a fellow commercial artist. They married in 1912 and worked in California and Chicago, becoming well-established muralists and members of both art scenes. In Chicago, Payne exhibited at the Art Institute and the Palette & Chisel Club. He also helped organize, and became the first president of, the Laguna Beach Art Association in 1918.
Payne is best known for his Western landscapes, and, as a plein air (outdoor) painter, he spent his career making painting excursions to California, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Canada. A trip to the Sierra Nevadas in 1916 made a lasting impression, and Payne returned to paint the majestic mountain range many times. Another pivotal moment in his career was a commission from the Santa Fe Railroad in 1917 to record the journey from Albuquerque to California. The Railroad frequently engaged artists to produce material for its advertising campaigns. For this commission, Payne spent four months exploring Canyon de Chelly, and the paintings he produced solidified his reputation as a landscape artist and his ties to the Southwest. According to Gallup Independent newspaper archives, Payne regularly summered in Gallup for the next three decades, making sightseeing trips in the surrounding area and often attending, and serving as a judge for, the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial art exhibit.
Payne’s career reached a new level of success in the 1920s. During that decade, he twice made two-year tours of Europe, and he moved to New York City, where his artwork was selling well, while continuing to travel the Southwest. When the Great Depression took its toll, he resettled in Los Angeles in 1932, where he would spend the remainder of his life. In 1941, he published an influential book, Composition of Outdoor Painting.
It is largely by serendipity that Sheldon Parsons became a painter of the New Mexico landscape. A student of noted artist William Merritt Chase at the National Academy of Design, Parsons was enjoying a career as a successful New York City portraitist in the early 1900s. President William McKinley and Susan B. Anthony were two of the famous Americans whose likenesses he painted. However, his career and life trajectory abruptly changed upon the death of his wife in 1913. Parsons sold everything and headed west with his twelve-year-old daughter to complete a mural commission in San Francisco. Parsons suffered a relapse of tuberculosis in Denver, and, on the advice of doctors, the duo changed course to head south to the curative climate of New Mexico.
Parsons settled in Santa Fe and, absorbed by the color and light of his new surroundings, began to paint landscapes saturated with the blue, red, and golden hues of the Southwest. He immediately made an impression in the budding artists’ colony, and his paintings quickly became “one of the chief attractions at the state museum in Santa Fe [the Museum of New Mexico].”1 At the same time, Parsons continued to show in New York City as a member of the prestigious Salmagundi Club, and his work was also exhibited across the country from Chicago to Oklahoma to Washington, DC. In 1914 and 1916, Parsons completed commissions from the Santa Fe Railroad for two paintings of the Grand Canyon. Within a year of its 1917 opening, the Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery (now the New Mexico Museum of Art) arranged a “permanent Parsons gallery . . . which [was] hung with 22 of his most representative canvases.”2
Parsons was a key figure in consolidating the efforts and cementing reputations of the Taos and Santa Fe art colonies. From the time he moved to Santa Fe, Parsons supported the Museum of New Mexico. In 1915, he organized an exhibition of Taos artists that was described thusly: “never before in its history has the southwest seen so great or so typically an American art exhibit.”3 By 1920, Parsons was appointed “curator of art exhibits” for the museum’s Art Gallery, a post he held for two years.
As curator, he engaged in the burgeoning debate over the new modernist movement. Parsons himself tended toward a more realist approach in his work. Though he was denied membership in 1923 to the academically inclined Taos Society of Artists, he remained informally affiliated with the group, spending a lot of time painting in Taos—and his daughter married Taos Society artist Victor Higgins in 1919. Yet Parsons remained open-minded. Contemporary critics noted changes in his approach—a move toward bold colors and “freedom . . . in handling”4—as he exhibited frequently in Santa Fe in the teens. After assuming the position of art museum curator, Parsons defended modernism, writing that “this movement in modern art is too great, too universal a movement, for there not to be some grain of truth at its heart and doubt begets humility and humility begets wisdom.”5 He then rearranged the Southwestern art exhibit at the museum, provoking praise from some and criticism from others. Parsons dismissed his critics as “illiterates applauding with their mouths”6 in a letter to the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican. Yet the political overtones of the debate—several modernist artists were staunch leftists, and the artistic community generally tended toward a “bohemian” outlook at odds with Santa Fe’s conservative political leadership—ultimately cost Parsons his job. He was fired to appease tensions between the museum and civic leaders.
Another notable achievement of Parsons’s as curator was to arrange a “loan art exhibit” of one hundred works from private collections in Santa Fe, the first of its kind. Parsons also helped to organize the Santa Fe Arts Club in 1921, which some scholars mark as the official beginning of the Santa Fe art colony.7
Over the next decade, Parsons continued to evolve, increasingly edging on modernism. Yet by the mid-1930s, as “radical” movements such as Transcendentalism gained a foothold and younger artists took charge of the Santa Fe art colony, Parsons’s work began to look “conservative, with Parsons himself being relegated to the ‘old guard.’”8 In 1938, one critic referred to him as the “dean of New Mexico landscape painters.”9 Though Parsons died in 1943, his work continued to be a staple of the Santa Fe art scene and museum exhibits.
T. Harmon Parkhurst. Sheldon Parsons, 1935?. Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), 073941.
William Robinson Leigh’s long and impressive career is woven together by the twin threads of adventure and storytelling. Leigh decided on a career in art early. He enrolled in classes at the Maryland Institute (the country’s second oldest art school) at the age of fourteen and studied there for three years before leaving for the Royal Academy in Munich, where he spent over a decade.
Upon his return to the United States from Germany in 1895, Leigh lived and worked in New York City, where he made a reputation as a book and magazine illustrator, creating images of everything from metropolitan to Martian life. Leigh’s sense of adventure also played out in an immersive cyclorama painting 115 yards in circumference and 15 yards in height.1 In 1906, he seized the opportunity of a trip west offered by the Santa Fe Railroad in exchange for a painting of the Grand Canyon. Leigh completed this commission and five other paintings, and the rest, as they say, is history. He would go on to become one of the country’s most famous Western American painters, earning numerous accolades by the end of his career.
Leigh once offered this bit of advice to budding artists: “What you paint is more important than how you paint.”3 He lived by his words. For fifty years, Leigh traveled dozens of times between New York and Arizona, New Mexico, and the mountain West, making hundreds of paintings of the landscape and people. Images of Native Americans feature prominently in his oeuvre—he painted Navajo and Hopi people every summer between 1912 and 1926.
It is also true that Leigh’s paintings captured the nation’s attention for their style in addition to their subject matter. By the 1950s, he had been dubbed “America’s Sagebrush Rembrandt,” admired for his detailed draftsmanship, use of color, and attention to the changing Southwest light.
His apparent wanderlust and skill also twice took him to Africa on expeditions in 1926 and 1928 with the American Museum of Natural History, for which he painted animals and exhibit backgrounds. Over the course of his career, Leigh wrote and illustrated several books on his travels, including Frontiers of Enchantment: An Artist’s Adventures in Africa and The Western Pony.
Gallup’s New Deal art collection consists of over 120 objects created, purchased, or donated from 1933 to 1942 through New Deal federal art programs administered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to support artists during the Great Depression.
The Gallup New Deal Art Virtual Museum features three types of exhibits, combining traditional and non-traditional approaches to illuminate academic, creative, and individual understandings.
