2026 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction / Lot 212210 / 379 • View Catalog •
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Voice of the Falls is included in the Eanger Irving Couse Catalogue Raisonné as number 2122. This painting features Taos Pueblo models Juan Concha (right) and his nephew, the young Ben Lujan (left).
Writing in The Craftsman in 1910, Joseph Lewis French observed of Eanger Irving Couse: “There is a studio downtown in New York City on which hangs the year round the sign, ‘No Models.’ Mr. E. Irving Couse lives there. He is a painter of Indians and he sometimes feels that he is the only painter in this artistic center of America who cannot arrange to secure satisfactory models when he needs them. As a rule a model from almost any land can be obtained in New York, with proper costumes and accessories; in fact, there are picturesque people who come here just for this purpose. But Mr. Couse feels that it would be hard to imagine a North American Indian taking an extra blanket and perhaps a pair of moccasins and traveling all the way to the metropolis for the purpose of having his picture painted by the man who prefers him as a model. Earning his living this way does not somehow seem to belong to the dignity of that Indian who is still picturesque enough to be painted.
“Mr. E. W. Deming, when he is not traveling in the West and living among the Indians, has found it possible sometimes to secure models, for his work down in MacDougall Alley, from the Wild West show, when it plays at Madison Square Garden in the spring season. Indeed, Mr. Deming is the friend of most of the Sioux Indians who are the star actors, and he finds especially the older men very dignified and very wonderful models, who love to give him their time because he has given them his friendship, but naturally this is a very occasional privilege, and as a matter of fact would not help Mr. Couse at all, for his interest in painting the Indians is confined to the Taos tribe who live down New Mexico way and do not travel with the Buffalo Bill show. They are more remote and very picturesque Indians who have not come much in contact with what we call civilization, who are still a very poetical and gentle people. And when Mr. Couse wants to paint them he has to travel out to the Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico.
“These simple people of a remote nation live a life that is quite idyllic, poetical. In religion they are Sun worshipers, in philosophy they are socialists. They have perhaps the simplest, truest and most natural scheme of existence of any people now living a community life anywhere in the whole world.
“Among this wonderfully interesting race, a people who have never strayed ten miles away from their native heath, wholly untouched by civilization, except as Mr. Couse and a few other painters have brought with them hints of other ways of living, Mr. Couse spends much of his time. Here a few years ago he bought an old convent which is the most imposing residence in the valley, and established home and studio. It is the inner life – the idyllic simple soul of this tribe of pueblo dwellers that he has sought to depict, as much as the outward fashion of their lives. Unspoiled by civilization, their dress unchanged from earliest days is sufficiently picturesque for the most poetical studies. Having won the confidence of these people, Mr. Couse now gets without difficulty even the shyest members of the tribe to pose for him.
“Mr. Couse studied in France in the early eighties under well-known French masters. He had a long term at the Académie Julian, and worked under Bouguereau and Tony Robert Fleming. He painted in France and on the Normandy coast and elsewhere for years, thus coming eventually to the most elemental subject in the world with the fullest technical equipment. He paints the Indian not primarily as the actor in a wild savage drama as Remington and Schreyvogel have, but as the peaceful dweller in primitive scenes, revealing them often as more poetical and philosophical than the more so-called civilized races. This is a work for which Mr. Couse’s temperament and talents peculiarly fit him.”
PROVENANCE
The artist, 1915
James W. Donnelly, Birmingham, Alabama
By descent through family, 1976
Golden West Galleries, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1981
Robert E. and Evelyn McKee, El Paso, Texas
Butterfield & Butterfield, Los Angeles, California, 1984
Wunderlich Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 1987
Private collection, Texas
EXHIBITED
83rd Annual Exhibition, National Academy of Design, New York, New York, 1908
Third Annual Exhibition, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, 1908
John Herron Institute, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1908-09
Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition, Seattle, Washington, 1909
LITERATURE
New York Tribune, March 22, 1908
Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition, 1909, listed
Palette & Bench, vol. II, no. 3, December 1909, p. 47, illustrated
Joseph Lewis French, “A Remote North American Civilization and its Portrayal in the Art of E. Irving Couse.” The Craftsman, vol. XVIII, no. 6, September 1910, p. 622, illustrated
Marian Lancaster and Dorothy Planck, “The Voice of the Falls.” The Pantagraph, May 19, 1923
Hattie B. Silvia, “The Realm of Art.” Fall River Herald News, August 18, 1934, p. 3
Martha Wood, “In City or Country.” The Birmingham News, August 14, 1955, illustrated
