Blumenschein's Birthday Gift

Today marks the 1874 birth of Taos School artist Ernest Blumenschein.

Along with Andrew Dasburg, Oscar Berninghaus, Victor Higgins, Walter Ufer, and other artists who came to be called the Taos School, Ernest Blumenschein found a lifelong subject in the landscape and people of the American Southwest.

"We all drifted into Taos like skilled hands looking for a good steady job," Blumenschein wrote in later years. "We lived only to paint."

This painting, titled The Gift, raises many questions. Why is a Taos Indian, who wears a traditional white shawl, carrying a Plains Indian pipe bag and wearing beaded leggings and moccasins? What is a large Rio Grande Pueblo pot doing in a Taos scene? Have these people gathered for a special occasion? What is the gift—the pipe bag or the pot?

Like many of the Taos School artists, Blumenschein often mixed artifacts of different tribes and cultures together, arranging objects to provide the most decorative picture.

Source: Merry Foresta. Lure of the West: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Ernest L. Blumenschein, 1874–1960, The Gift, 1922, oil, 40 1/2 x 40 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of Design.