Mountain Landscape
This conversation is connected to Mountain Landscape.
A view looking across rolling hills in muted, sun-bleached colors, with patches of ochre and rust-brown earth showing through sparse vegetation. Dark green trees or shrubs dot the lower right foreground. A thin strip of pale blue sky is visible at the top. The canvas weave shows through the thin, dry paint, and the brushwork is quick and directional, following the contours of the terrain. This is the landscape around Taos, New Mexico — high desert country where the sagebrush and piñon turn the hills that particular range of muted green and purple. W. Herbert Dunton, known as "Buck", was born in Augusta, Maine, worked as a ranch hand as a teenager, and sold his first drawings to newspapers at sixteen. He became a successful illustrator in New York, contributing to Harper's Weekly, Collier's, Scribner's, and Cosmopolitan, and illustrated several of Zane Grey's Western novels. In 1912, Ernest Blumenschein told him about Taos. He moved there that year and became a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists in 1915.