64: FERN KNECHT (1888-1979) OIL/PANEL IN TAOS SCHOOL FRAME

Fern Elizabeth Edie Knecht
Portrait of Toulepela (Swift Lightning) (Circa 1925-1930)
The oil on artist's board signed lower left, various original tags and notations verso, displayed in a very impressive Taos School frame.




In the late 1920s Fern Edie Knecht, wife of a prominent engineering consultant from St. Louis, traveled west to study painting with Ernest Blumenschein, a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists (1915-1927). Blumenschein and society co-founder Bert Greer Phillips discovered Taos by accident in 1898 while the two were on a sketching excursion from Denver to Mexico. Each eventually settled there with their families and over time became major American artists credited with cultivating the Taos art colony and thereby a major 'school' of American art.




Fern Knecht's portrait of Toulepela with rising, distant pine-covered hills of New Mexico as backdrop for the sitter depicted as if just inside the frame is a wildly unabashed homage to her Taos teacher Ernest Blumenschein, borrowing heavily from his 1920 composition 'Star Road and White Sun' (Albuquerque Museum of Art).
Board measures 30 x 24 with a framed size of 36.5 x 30.5 inches.
Very good original untouched condition. There are no issues of scratches, losses, repairs, in-painting or touch-up.
Provenance: One of several paintings acquired from a relative of the artist and held in a Kansas City collection until recently.
$3,000 - $5,000