Oscar Edmund Berninghaus (1874-1953)
A founder of the Taos Society of Artists, Oscar Berninghaus was born in 1874 in St. Louis, Missouri and developed an interest in art through his family’s lithography business. In 1898, he traveled for the first time into New Mexico and Arizona.
This visit began a tradition of spending the winter months in St. Louis and the summers in Taos. In 1912, he joined the founding members of the Taos Society of Artists, whose goal was to promote sales of their work. In 1919, he bought an old adobe house near Taos overlooking the town and in 1925 settled there.
Berninghaus’s style was one of short, quick brush strokes, which gave his work a unique texture. Early in his career, he painted on site, but later from memory, which was described as being extremely accurate. One of the reasons he was committed to the Taos Art Colony was that he believed it was a distinctly American art, something definitive of subject matter unique to this country. He depictted Indians in a realistic, unromanticized way, going about their lives as they actually did in twentieth-century New Mexico.