The Taos Six Collection: An Homage to W. Herbert Dunton

from The Taos Six Collection: An Homage to W. Herbert Dunton

The small mountain village of Taos, New Mexico, was forever changed by the collective vision and initiative of the Taos Society of Artists. Founded in 1915, the Society brought together like-minded painters seeking camaraderie and professional support from one another as they created a regional art movement to highlight the land and the cultures before them. Oscar E. Berninghaus, Joseph Henry Sharp, Eanger Irving Couse, William Herbert Dunton, Ernest L. Blumenschein, and Bert Geer Phillips were the six founding members, and they were largely responsible for establishing the village as an art colony that would sustain its legacy well over a century later.

Founded in Taos thirty years ago and now based in Santa Fe, Blue Rain Gallery honors the energy and influence that these six founding artists brought to the region. The Taos Six Collection is a series of exhibitions produced by Blue Rain Gallery in which a different founding member of the TSA is acknowledged each year as Blue Rain Gallery artists paint tributes to their legacy. This season inaugurates the fourth year of the series with an Homage to W. Herbert Dunton. Artists Dennis Ziemienski, Kathryn Stedham, Jim Vogel, Roseta Santiago, Matthew Sievers, Nathan Bennett, Rimi Yang, Sean Diediker, Robin Jones, Bryce Pettit, Brad Overton, Hyrum Joe, Erin Currier, and GL Richardson have each selected an original Dunton masterwork to pay tribute to and adapt through their own reinterpretation of the original.

William Herbert Dunton, often referred to as “Buck,” was born in 1878 on his family’s farm near Augusta, Maine, where he developed an early interest in hunting and the outdoors. He travelled extensively as a young man, working as a ranch hand and cowboy and visited places like Montana, where he first fell in love with the West.

Dunton trained at the Cowles Art School in Boston and enjoyed a brief career as an illustrator in New York, with works published in magazines such as Harper’s, Collier’s and Schribner’s. He moved to Taos in 1912 on the recommendation of Ernest Blumenschein, his instructor at the Art Student’s League in New York. Dunton did not care for city life, and Taos offered the solace of open terrain, the opportunity to cowboy and hunt, and a place to paint his favorite subjects.

Dunton’s paintings depicted the West as vast and unspoiled in an attempt to capture a lifestyle and a landscape that were changing before his eyes. Cowboys on horseback, hunters, wildlife, and the vast and majestic landscape were among his most common subjects, as he felt strongly that this way of life and this rugged, unfettered landscape should be preserved. Unlike his fellow artists, who painted Native figures and their environment, Dunton instead concentrated on the cowboy lifestyle, thus offering an idealized version of frontier living. He differed from the others as well in his treatment of rugged frontierswomen on horseback, who were largely ignored by the other Western painters.

Dunton formally resigned from the Taos Society of Artists in 1922, likely due to disparaging remarks Walter Ufer had made about Blumenschein. His resignation led to a period of self-promotion, during which Dunton scheduled one-man exhibitions throughout the region, including Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. Dunton experienced a decline in health around 1928, at first from a horse-related accident, then later due to multiple forms of cancer, which took his life in 1936 at the age of 57.

W. Herbert Dunton’s work enjoys new life today, as Blue Rain artists honor the TSA legacy while exploring the mastery of the founding members and paying tribute to them via their own contemporary interpretation of the subject matter.