Eanger Irving Couse (American, 1866 to 1936)
As a child Eanger Irving Couse admired the Chippewa Indians who lived near his home in Saginaw, Michigan. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be an artist, and his earliest attempts at drawing were of Native American subjects. At age seventeen he left home for Chicago, where he studied briefly at the Chicago Art Institute, followed by two years at the National Academy of Design in New York, before going to Paris in 1886, where he studied until 1890 at the Academie Julian under William Bouguereau. At Julian’s he developed his love of figure painting, which lead eventually to his career as an academic figure painter depicting the life and culture of the Pueblo Indians in Taos, New Mexico.
Couse first visited Taos in 1902. In a beautiful setting remote from the railway, the town retained an appealing frontier quality. The Native Americans at nearby Taos Pueblo were unaffected by the seamier side of acculturation that had impacted so many other native groups. Couse found Taos to be the perfect location for his work and it became his summer home from that time forward.
Information courtesy of Neal Auction Company December 2007