2025 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction13 / 24 • View Catalog •
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VERSO
Artist label with title
Label, The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Leigh biographer June DuBois wrote, “In his autobiography and other writing Leigh has given his reasons for his consuming desire to paint Western subjects: his love of animals, his fondness of nature and the unpretentious, a childhood infused with Indian folklore, and above all, his certainty that the West represented the intrinsically authentic America. Out here he felt he would throw off the gloomy shroud of the New York art world and come alive again, free to paint subjects which hold meaning for Americans in any style he chose.
“In the meantime his painting of Wyoming and the Southwest had come to the attention of many. In an article, Thomas Moran was quoted as saying, ‘W. R. Leigh has preferred the sleeping bag, frying pan, and the stars to the contrivances of the railroad people.… For eight years, good pictures by this artist have been coming out of the West. At first they were mainly canyons and mountains, western skies and sagebrush, moonlit buttes and sunsets. Later they came to include characteristic pictures of Indian and cowboy life.’”
PROVENANCE
Doyle, New York, New York, 1997
Estate of Joan B. Steiniger, New York
The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Collection of Judson C. and Nancy Sue Ball, Chicago, Illinois
Heritage Auctions, Dallas, Texas, 2014
Private collection, Wyoming
LITERATURE
June DuBois, W. R. Leigh: The Definitive Illustrated Biography, Lowell Press, 1977, pp. 108-09, illustrated
