Carl Oscar Borg

(1879–1947)

Carl Oscar Borg was born into a poor family in Grinstad parish, Dalsland province, Sweden. Oscar Borg moved to London at age 15 to assist portrait and marine artist George Johansen. In 1901, he sailed for the United States. Borg taught art at the California Art Institute in Los Angeles and at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts. He became a protégé of American philanthropist and art patron Phoebe Hearst. She gave him the opportunity to return to Europe to study art.

Borg was influenced by the nature of the southwestern United States, especially the states of Arizona and New Mexico. He worked in various mediums including oil, watercolor, etchings, and woodblock. He was commissioned to paint posters for the railway company, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. His posters were put up on the company's sales offices and attracted attention. He was known for his dramatic paintings of the Grand Canyon.

Borg was a founding member of the Painter's Club of Los Angeles and the California Art Club. He was one of the first art directors for a major movie studio in Hollywood. He worked with the production of silent films in the years 1925–1928. Examples of his art are on display at Brigham Young University, Harvard University, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics.

“The Prospector”
Carl Oscar Borg
28"×34" | Gouache

E. Irving Couse

(1866–1936)

E.I. Couse was born in Saginaw, Michigan, where he first started drawing the Chippewa Indians who lived nearby. Couse worked hard to pay for his art education, occasionally dropping out to earn money while attending the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Academy of Design. In 1886 Eanger Irving Couse left for Paris to study at the Academie Julian, where he met the American artist, Joseph Henry Sharp, who often spoke of Taos. Couse met his future wife, Virginia Walker, an illustration student in Paris, in 1887, and they were married in 1889. Moving back to the United States, the couple settled in Washington State at Virginia’s family ranch. Couse was interested in attempting to create a painting with Native American indians as the subject matter, eventually producing a historical work titled “The Captive” based on an incident known as the “Whitman Massacre”. This painting was shown at the Paris Salon in in 1892 and is now part of the permanent collection at the Phoenix Art Museum. In 1893 Couse and his wife moved back to France, where they remained in a small coastal town in Picardy for three years as he continued to paint in the small art colony. Their son Kibbey was born there prior to the family’s return to the United States.

Couse would become a frequent visitor and resident of Taos from 1902 on, when he heard about the town from his friend Ernest Blumenschein. He focused primarily on paintings of the Indigenous people who lived in the surrounding area. In 1912 when the historically important Taos Society of Artists was formed, Couse was elected its first President. The original founding members of the group, known collectively as the “Taos Six” included Couse, Joseph Henry Sharp, Oscar Berninghaus, Bert Geer Phillips, W. Herbert Dunton, and Ernest Blumenschein. Later members included E. Martin Hennings and Walter Ufer.

E. Irving Couse is best known for his intimate images of Native Americans in moments of spiritual ceremony and quiet repose. 

“The Tom Tom Player” c. 1904
E. Irving Couse
15"×21.25" | Watercolor

Sydney Laurence

(1865–1940)

Sydney Mortimer Laurence was born in Brooklyn, New York and studied at the Art Students League of New York. He married Alexandrina Fredricka Dupre in 1889.

He exhibited regularly by the late 1880s. He and his wife traveled to England, settling in 1889 in the English artists' colony of St. Ives, Cornwall from 1889 to 1898. over the next decade he exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists and was included in the Paris Salon in 1890, 1894, and 1895, winning an award in 1894.

Laurence abandoned his family and came to Alaska in 1903 or 1904.

Laurence was the first professionally trained artist to make Alaska his home. He moved to Alaska in 1904 for reasons still unknown. Records from 1907 show he lived in the village of Tyonek on the North Shore of Cook Inlet in Southcentral Alaska, about 60 miles from Ship Creek where Anchorage would begin years later. Living the hard life of the pioneer prospector, he painted little in his first years in the then-District of Alaska, but between 1911 and 1914 he began to focus once again on his art. He moved from Valdez to the nascent town of Anchorage in 1915 and by 1920 was Alaska's most prominent painter.

Laurence painted a variety of Alaskan scenes in his long and prolific career, among them sailing ships and steamships in Alaskan waters, totem poles in Southeast Alaska, dramatic headlands and the quiet coves and streams of Cook Inlet, cabins and caches under the northern lights, and Alaska Natives, miners, and trappers engaged in their often solitary lives in the northern wilderness.

But the image of Denali from the hills above the rapids of the Tokositna River became his trademark. It is this image more than any other which personifies Laurence for his many admirers and collectors in Alaska and beyond.

Laurence forged a uniquely personal style by applying the tonalist techniques he had learned in New York and Europe to the wilderness of the North. He, more than any other artist, defined for Alaskans and others the image of Alaska as "The Last Frontier."

In May 1927, Laurence married Jeanne Kunath, a French-born artist who had emigrated to the United States in 1920. He died in Anchorage on December 10, 1940.

Several places were named for Laurence in his adopted hometown. Laurence Court is a short street in the Bootleggers Cove neighborhood of Anchorage. Perhaps the most significant was the Sydney Laurence Auditorium, which sat downtown at the northwest corner of West Sixth Avenue and F Street. This structure was replaced during the 1980s by the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts in what Anchorage called "Project 80s", a large-scale civic improvement program carried out under mayors George M. Sullivan and Tony Knowles; now the Sydney Laurence theater is smallest of three stages at the Performing Arts Center.

“Mount McKinley”
Sydney Laurence
12"×16" | Oil

 W.R. Leigh

(1866–1955)

William Robinson Leigh was born in Berkeley County, West Virginia and began drawing at an early age. When he was twelve, W.W. Corcoran (founder of the Corcoran Gallery of Art) paid Leigh $100 for a drawing. After three years of training at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore, he left for Europe to study. Most of his twelve years in Europe were spent studying at the Royal Academy in Munich. In 1897, after Leigh returned to New York, he made his reputation as an illustrator for leading national magazines.

Leigh fulfilled a childhood dream of going west when Schribner’s sent him to North Dakota on assignment. During the next twenty-nine years, Leigh returned to the west often, sometimes on assignments and sometimes on his own. Some of his favorite subjects were the lands of the Hopi and the Navajo. He painted with the southwestern palette of soft pinks, purples, reds, blues, and yellows. The critics who had never been west, complained that his colors were too brilliant and ostentatious. Critics’ initial hesitancy aside, Leigh has become one of the most celebrated painters to capture the American west, noted for both his contributions to both illustration and fine art.

Alfred Jacob Miller

(1810–1874)

Miller was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the eldest of nine children of George W. and Harriet J. Miller. Miller’s father was a merchant and tavern keeper in central Baltimore, and also had a farm in Hawkins Point. Miller attended a private school in Baltimore, John D. Craig’s Academy, but did not receive formal art instruction there. He may have received his first lessons in art from Thomas Sully. In 1832, with the financial support of his family and art patrons in Baltimore, Miller traveled to Paris to study art. He was admitted as an auditor to life drawing classes at the École des Beaux-Arts, and copied paintings in the collections of the Louvre.In 1833, he traveled to Italy, visiting Bologna, Florence, and Venice before settling in Rome, where he studies at the English Life School.During his travels in Europe, he became friends with the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen and studied with the French painter Horace Vernet.

He returned to Baltimore in 1834, where he opened a downtown studio and advertised himself as a painter of portraits and Old Master copies. Professional and financial difficulties may have prompted his decision to move to New Orleans in 1837. The city was a relatively open market for artists, and Miller quickly established a studio on Chartes Street and began receiving orders for portraits. It was in his studio that he met the Scottish aristocrat and adventurer, Sir William Drummond Stewart.

Stewart hired Miller to accompany him and record his hunting journey to the Rocky Mountains.That same year, along with representatives of the American Fur Company, they ventured as far as Fort William and Green River.

After returning to New Orleans later that year, Miller started working up his sketches in watercolors and oils. The scenes and incidents of the hunting journey were the foundation of a series of paintings documenting Native Americans of the United States. In July 1838 Miller was able to arrange an exhibition in New Orleans. In October 1840 he traveled with his paintings to Stewart’s Murthly Castle in Scotland, where a collection of his commissioned work was ultimately hung.

After spending a year in Scotland and another in London, Miller returned to Baltimore in April 1842. He established himself as an acknowledged portrait artist in the city. He died on June 26, 1874.

The “Portrait of the Captain Stewart With Indians by Campfire” captures a moment of quiet negotiations, planning, or possible storytelling around the firelight. Stewart was a distinguished member at any rendezvous and was often surrounded by trappers and Indians. Miller captured a glimpse of nuance in the historical adventures of westward visions in this gem of a painting.

Winold Reiss

(1886–1953)

F. Winold Reiss was a German-born American artist and graphic designer. He was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, the second son of Fritz Reiss (1857–1914) and his wife. He grew up surrounded by art, as his father was a well-known landscape artist and his brother became a sculptor.

Reiss became a portraitist. His philosophy was that an artist must travel to find the most interesting subjects; influenced by his father and his own curiosity, he drew subjects from many peoples and walks of life. In 1913 he immigrated to the United States, where he was able to follow his interest in Native Americans. In 1920 he went West for the first time, working for a lengthy period on the Blackfeet Reservation. Over the years Reiss painted more than 250 works depicting Native Americans. These paintings by Reiss became known more widely beginning in the 1920 and to the 1950s, when the Great Northern Railway commissioned Reiss to do paintings of the Blackfeet which were then distributed widely as lithographed reproductions on Great Northern calendars. In 1931, and 1934-37, Reiss organized a summer art school, also referred to as an artists’ colony near Glacier National Park.

Joseph Henry Sharp

(1859–1953)

Joseph Henry Sharp (September 27, 1859 – August 29, 1953) was an American painter and a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists, of which he is considered the “Spiritual Father”. Sharp was one of the earliest European-American artists to visit Taos, New Mexico, which he saw in 1893 with artist John Hauser. He painted American Indian portraits and cultural life, as well as Western landscapes. President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned him to paint the portraits of 200 Native American warriors who survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn. While working on this project, Sharp lived on land of the Crow Agency, Montana, where he built Absarokee Hut in 1905. Boosted by his sale of 80 paintings to Phoebe Hearst, Sharp quit teaching and began to paint full-time.

In 1909, he bought a former chapel in Taos to use as a studio, near the house of the artist E. Irving Couse. In 1912 he and his wife moved to the area full-time. He built a house with studio near the chapel. Both artists’ homes and studios are part of the Eanger Irving Couse House and Studio—Joseph Henry Sharp Studios, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 

“Crucita and Son”
Joseph Henry Sharp
16"×12" | Oil