Smith is best known as a portraitist who spent most of his career in New York City, where he also painted the occasional cityscape and seascape. A reported member of the Salmagundi Art Club in Greenwich Village, he painted many capital-S Society portraits, including one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Union Club of the City of New York. He also painted a portrait of fellow artist and Salmagundi Club member Childe Hassam, now in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art. He was the director of the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, NY.
New Deal Contribution: Contributing Artists
Edgar Alwin Payne
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.
William Robinson Leigh
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.
Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington
Anna Hyatt Huntington was the foremost female sculptor of her time, producing everything from small medals to monumental works. Though best known for her equestrian monuments, Huntington launched her career with small animal subjects. Hyatt Huntington’s fascination with animals was formed over many visits to the zoo with her father, a professor of paleontology and zoology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her animal sculptures are noted for their action, energy, verve, subtlety, and realism. As one critic wrote, “Anna Hyatt Huntington displays some of her living animals which are surpassed only by the great Hellenistic masters of animal life. Every beast seems to have waited for this American lady to give it soul.”1
Like her pouncing, fighting, attacking, howling, and—in the case of the Gallup New Deal Art collection—braying animals, as well as her armor-clad version of Joan of Arc, the artist herself was, by all accounts, a force to be reckoned with. (Indeed, Hyatt Huntington once went as Joan of Arc, in full armor and riding a white horse, to a charity ball event.) By 1912, at the age of thirty-six, she was among the highest-paid professional women in the United States. In 1932, she was among the earliest women artists to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Over the course of her career, she received numerous awards and honors. After her 1923 marriage to philanthropist Archer Huntington, the son of railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington, Hyatt Huntington became a leading patron of American sculpture. With her husband, she established and designed the country’s first public outdoor sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, in 1931. Her sculptures are in the permanent collections of more than 200 museums across the United States as well as overseas.
Albert Lorey Groll
An East Coast-based and European-trained artist, Albert Lorey Groll became a much admired, successful painter of the Southwestern landscape. Groll was part of the first wave of European and European-American artists to venture west and participate in what scholar Joseph Traugott has termed the “culture rush,”1 capturing images of new—to them—places, peoples and cultures.
His career as a Western American artist began in 1904, when he accompanied Brooklyn ethnologist Stewart Culin on an expedition to the territories of Arizona and New Mexico. On that trip he was introduced to Lorenzo Hubbell, owner of the Ganado Trading Post (now known as the Hubbell Trading Post). One of the desert scenes he painted on that trip, titled Arizona, won Groll a gold medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in January 1906 and “created a furor when it was exhibited in New York” six months later.2 The artist wrote to Hubbell that his Western paintings “have made a decided hit, both artistically and financially; in fact, my visit to the Southwest has been my lucky stars.” Groll promptly returned to New Mexico that same year to visit Laguna Pueblo, this time taking along his friend and colleague from the Royal Academy in Munich, William Robinson Leigh. Groll is credited with introducing Leigh, who would become another famous Western American artist, to the Southwest. Moreover, as he continued to make frequent trips to and prolifically paint the West, Groll is widely, though not universally, credited for founding the Santa Fe art colony, with the Santa Fe New Mexican reporting in 1923 that “It is said that it was not until Mr. Groll visited Santa Fe that artists came out to New Mexico’s capital to make their residence.”3
Over the course of four decades, Groll made a name for himself painting vast skies and towering cloud formations on visits to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, Hopi Pueblo, Taos, Gallup, and beyond. One reviewer commented in 1922 that “A. L. Groll takes the desert for his subject and paints it under the cloud dotted blue sky which the very mention of his name recalls.”4 And that reputation only grew. By the 1940s, he was being heralded as “the greatest of American sky painters.”5 In addition to achieving broad popularity, his status and legacy as a founding Western American artist was cemented when he was made an affiliate member of the exclusive Taos Society of Artists. Groll’s career developed in lock-step with the Western American art movement, and also represents the origins and formation of that movement.
In 1941, Groll donated at least three artworks to Gallup’s Federal Art Center for the purposes, as reported in the local newspaper at the time, of forming “a nucleus for a projected permanent museum and art centre [sic] here.” The article goes on to explain that Groll has been “inspired by the gorgeous colors of the skies and also in rock formations near Gallup.”6
Frederick Detwiller
The son of a doctor and the grandson of Henry Detwiller, one of the first homeopathic physicians in the United States, Frederick Detwiller expressed an early interest in art and won a school drawing contest at the age of eleven. At the urging of his father, however, Detwiller originally pursued a career in law. It wasn’t until 1908, when he was twenty-six, that he turned his attention professionally to art. He studied architectural design and painting at Columbia University before advancing his education in Europe. At the start of World War I, in 1914, he returned to the United States and established a studio in New York City, where he joined several artists’ associations including the Salmagundi Club, Society of Independent Artists, and The Artists’ Fellowship, Inc., an organization dedicated to aiding artists unable to work, and began exhibiting his work in solo and group shows. Detwiller’s art focuses on architecture (the New York City skyline in particular) as well as scenes from New England fishing villages and seascapes—the artist lived in Noank, CT, from 1917–1921 and made frequent visits to New Harbor, ME.
Detwiller’s connections to Gallup and/or New Mexico are unknown. His archives, located at Skillman Library at Lafayette College, include his writings (speeches, articles, letters) on topics such as the need for increased public support for the arts, opposition to juried exhibitions, wrongful taxation of artists, and advocacy for the preservation for Native American art. Perhaps a combination of his progressive views on arts policy and his interest in Native art prompted him to heed fellow East Coast artist Albert Lorey Groll’s call for support of a potential museum in Gallup during the New Deal.
Elbridge Ayer (E. A.) Burbank
Elbridge Ayer Burbank studied life drawing and portraiture at the Chicago Academy of Design and in Munich, Germany (where he met William Robinson Leigh and, likely, Albert Lorey Groll, two artists who would also go on to become well-known Western American painters). Though he opened a studio in Chicago and his work was critically acclaimed, he followed an unlikely career path, electing to spend time in the southern United States sketching African American subjects rather than trading in society portraits.
His first commission and introduction to the West came by way of Northwest Magazine, which hired Burbank to illustrate the Northern Pacific Railway route from Minnesota to the Puget Sound in Washington for the purposes of encouraging homesteading. His career breakthrough, however, came courtesy of his uncle, Edward E. Ayer, president of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, who commissioned him in 1897 to paint portraits of prominent Native Americans in Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico.
By 1902, Burbank was traveling extensively throughout the West—primarily Oklahoma, the Southwest, and the Dakotas—painting Native American leaders, individuals, groups, and ceremonies. He spent a significant amount of time and established a temporary studio in Ganado, AZ (notably, the US Census shows he was living there in 1910 with his young wife, Nettie). There, he befriended Ganado trading post owner Lorenzo Hubbell and did many drawings of Navajo people in red chalk still on view at the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site.
Burbank spent almost two decades on his Field Museum mission, becoming one of the most prolific and prominent portraitists of Native American people of his era. In all, he painted over 1,200 portraits of Native peoples from more than one hundred tribes/nations. Burbank is perhaps best known for having painted the famous, turn-of-the-20th-century Apache leader Geronimo five times. He is said to be the only artist to paint his portrait from life.
Burbank’s work figures deeply in the American consciousness of Native Americans. Several prominent museums, along with one of the country’s first department stores (Wanamaker’s), competed with each other in a bidding war over his Native American portraits at the time he made them, and the Chicago public school system ordered 10,000 color reproductions of a single image. In 1944, the artist published the book Burbank Among the Indians, and his images continue to be widely viewed and distributed.
By the mid-1910s, Burbank had left Ganado to open a studio in Los Angeles, CA. During the Depression, he supported himself by drawing and selling scenes for postcards and greeting cards, pictures of famous Americans, and copies of his Native American studies. He spent the last two decades of his life being treated for bipolar disorder. He died in 1949 in San Francisco after being hit by a cable car.