2025 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction54 / 80 • View Catalog •
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Noted art historian Rick Stewart wrote, “Bert Phillips made up his mind to stay in Taos the first day that he arrived on a visit. He lived and worked there for nearly sixty years, never tiring of what he described as ‘the romance of this great pure-aired land that makes the most lasting impression on my mind and heart.’ Phillips was born in Hudson, New York, but eventually moved to New York City where he studied at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design. In 1894 he journeyed to England and painted in the countryside, before going on to Paris to enroll in the Julian Academy. There he met his lifelong friend Ernest Blumenschein, and they returned to America and shared a studio in New York. In 1898 Phillips traveled to New Mexico, initially drawn to Taos because his boyhood hero, Kit Carson, was buried there; instead, he became entranced with the stark, wild beauty of the region. He was determined to study the Pueblo people and their environment before much of it was forever altered.”
PROVENANCE
J. Ross Wood, ca. 1940s
Mr. and Mrs. John Mahan, Canton, Ohio, by descent
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1984
Private collection
Zaplin Lampert Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Private collection, Spokane, Washington
EXHIBITED
Masterworks of the Taos Founders, Museum of Art of the American West, Houston, Texas, 1984
LITERATURE
Masterworks of the Taos Founders, Peters Corporation, 1984, p. 17, illustrated
Southwest Profile, July 1985, p. 22, illustrated
Julie Schimmel and Robert R. White, Bert Geer Phillips and the Taos Art Colony, University of New Mexico Press, 1994, pp. 203, 266, listed
