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Phillips, Bert (1868 - 1956)

Currency:USD Category:Art Start Price:40,000.00 USD Estimated At:40,000.00 - 60,000.00 USD
Phillips, Bert (1868 - 1956)
<strong>Phillips, Bert </strong>
(1868 - 1956)

<strong>Gathering Water at Taos Pueblo</strong>

oil on canvas
18 1/4 x 22 1/4 inches
signed lower right: <i>Phillips.</i>

Bert Geer Phillips was born in the industrial town of Hudson, New York, in 1868 and his artistic talent was apparent from childhood. Phillips began formal studies in Hudson around 1884, continuing on to the Art Student League and the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1894, Phillips traveled to Europe, initially to England and then on to France, where he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris alongside his future Taos Society colleagues, Joseph Henry Sharp and Ernest Blumenschein. Sharp told Blumenschein and Phillips about his visit to Taos the previous year and encouraged the two young artists to make the journey as soon as they were able. Phillips and Blumenschein headed west in the summer of 1898 with the intent of taking a painting trip to Mexico. Once in Denver they outfitted themselves with horses, a wagon, camping and art supplies, and a large Navy revolver, and headed south. Not long after they had crossed into the northern New Mexico Territory, fate intervened in the form of a broken wheel. Phillips
waited with the wagon while Blumenschein loaded the broken wheel on a horse and walked the 20
miles to the nearest blacksmith in Taos. Blumenschein returned three days later, thoroughly smitten with the beautiful town and the nearby pueblo, and the two artists continued on to Taos where they sold their wagon, harness, and remaining horse, and “pitched into work with unknown enthusiasm.” Blumenschein returned to New York after three months but Phillips stayed on, becoming the town’s first permanent resident Anglo artist. The Taos Society might have come to pass one way or another, but Phillips’ determination to make the isolated mountain his home and to create a community of artists there was crucial to the founding of the Society in 1915.

Phillips was a true devotee of the romantic legend of the American West, and he was to become the Taos Society artist whose portrayal of Indian life was the most idyllic and romanticized. His scenes of the Pueblo and its inhabitants are typically infused with the sense of an earthly paradise in which man and nature co-exist in a state of perpetual, unchanging physical and spiritual harmony. The painting <i>Gathering Water at Taos Pueblo</i> is a classic example of Phillips’ work, exuding the atmosphere of a peaceful summer afternoon in northern New Mexico. True to his vision, the same view of the Pueblo can still be seen to this day, essentially unchanged, with the possible exception of the dress of the Indians and the presence of a few tourists and automobiles.—DC


Provenance:
Private Collection, Los Angeles

Literature
Mable Dodge Luhan, <i>Taos and its Artists,</i> New York, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947
Julie Schimmel and Robert R. White, <i>Bert Geer Phillips and the Taos Art Colony,</i> Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1994
Porter, Ebie and Campbell, <i>Taos Artists and Their Patrons 1898-1950,</i> University of Notre Dame, The Snite Museum of Art, 1999