Few places in America have shaped the way the country pictures itself as deeply as a small adobe town in the mountains of northern New Mexico. At the start of the twentieth century, a handful of painters trained in Paris and New York settled in Taos, and the images they sent east helped define what the Southwest meant to millions of people who would never see it.
In this guide, we look at how the Taos art colony began and how the Taos Society of Artists organized it. We then follow the modernists who reshaped it after the Society ended, and close with what collectors should know about this work today.
Alyce Frank, The Hondo River at Penasco. View Work
The story usually begins with Joseph Henry Sharp, a Cincinnati painter who came to Taos in 1893 on assignment to illustrate life at Taos Pueblo for Harper's Weekly. Taos made a lasting impression on him. Studying at the Académie Julian in Paris over the following years, he described northern New Mexico to fellow students, among them Bert Geer Phillips and Ernest L. Blumenschein.
In September 1898, Phillips and Blumenschein were traveling by wagon from Denver toward Mexico when a wheel broke about twenty miles north of Taos. A coin toss decided who would ride into town to have it repaired. Blumenschein went. He found Taos and its Pueblo even more compelling than Sharp had described, and the two stayed to paint. Blumenschein returned to New York that winter, while Phillips remained. The pair began writing to each other about founding an art colony on the model of the French Barbizon painters, who had settled in a village outside Paris to paint directly from the landscape.
By 1912, Blumenschein, Sharp, Oscar E. Berninghaus, E. Irving Couse and W. Herbert "Buck" Dunton had all arrived in Taos. With Phillips, these six formalized their friendship in 1915 as the Taos Society of Artists, with Couse as its first president. The Society had clear standards. A member had to have worked in Taos for three consecutive years and to have proven skill in painting Native American subjects. Exhibition in respected galleries or in New York was also expected.
What drew them was specific. The Society focused on the fundamental themes of the Southwestern landscape and its light, and on the Native American and Hispanic cultures of northern New Mexico. Many members had trained in European ateliers and belonged to artists' circles abroad, and they brought academic figure painting to subjects that American audiences had rarely seen rendered with such care.
Victor Czerkas, Kiva Gathering. View Work
The founders are often called the Taos Six:
Joseph Henry Sharp: the first of the group to paint Taos, known for portraits of Native American sitters. He bought a house on Kit Carson Road in 1908 and built a studio beside it.
E. Irving Couse: the Society's first president and Sharp's neighbor from 1909, celebrated for interiors of Taos Pueblo life lit by firelight.
Ernest L. Blumenschein: the painter whose ride into town began the colony, and one of its most inventive colorists.
Bert Geer Phillips: the first of the group to settle in Taos, and later a founding board member of the Harwood Foundation.
Oscar E. Berninghaus: a painter of the people and landscape of the Taos valley who arrived in the early years of the colony.
W. Herbert "Buck" Dunton: the member most drawn to cowboys and ranch life, bringing the working West into the Society's repertoire.
The Society grew to include Julius Rolshoven, E. Martin Hennings, Catharine C. Critcher, Kenneth Adams, Walter Ufer and Victor Higgins. Its most effective tool was the traveling exhibition. Shows of members' work circulated across the country, carrying images of Taos Pueblo and the Hispanic villages of the northern mountains to audiences far from New Mexico. The Society disbanded in 1927, its purpose largely accomplished: Taos had become one of the best-known art colonies in America.
Alyce Frank, The Church at Las Trampas. View Work
Exhibitions reached collectors. The railway reached everyone else. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, which was building tourism across the Southwest, commissioned and reproduced Taos paintings for its calendars and advertisements. Couse was the most visible beneficiary: his paintings appeared on Santa Fe Railway calendars from 1922 to 1934, and his images of Pueblo life hung in homes and offices across the country.
The effect on the market was lasting. The same railway that carried travelers to New Mexico carried the Taos vision of the Southwest into American visual culture, and it created a generation of collectors who first encountered these painters on a calendar page. Their demand, in turn, supported the artists who stayed.
The Society's founders came from the East and the Midwest, and they painted Taos through the eyes of outsiders. Their portraits are often dignified and deeply observed, but they also present a timeless, idealized Pueblo world, removed from the pressures its people actually faced in the early twentieth century. Museums and scholars now read these paintings with that tension in mind.
Some of that distance was built into the working method. Couse, for instance, worked largely in the studio with a small number of Taos Pueblo models, composing scenes that feel observed but were carefully staged. Recognizing this does not diminish the paintings. It helps collectors understand them as what they are: accomplished works of art shaped by the expectations of their time and their audience.
Taos Pueblo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States, was never only a subject. Its people sat for these painters and worked alongside them, and some developed artistic voices of their own. The collection of the Harwood Museum of Art includes work by Juan Mirabal, a Taos Pueblo painter active in the same decades, a reminder that the art history of Taos was never written by the colony alone.
Taos Pueblo is also far more than a backdrop from the past. Its multistory adobe buildings, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, remain home to a living community with its own governance and ceremonial life. Visitors who come to Taos for its painting history encounter a place whose Native residents have been there for centuries before the first easel arrived, and will be there long after the last collector leaves.
As the Society faded, a different Taos was already taking shape. Mabel Dodge Luhan, a patron who settled in Taos and made her home a meeting place for writers and artists, drew figures from the New York avant-garde to the valley. Andrew Dasburg arrived in 1918 at her invitation and later taught at the University of New Mexico's art field school in Taos. The English painter Dorothy Brett came into the same circle and stayed for the rest of her life.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Taos became one of the centers of modernist activity in the United States. Painters such as Emil Bisttram, Louis Ribak, Clay Spohn and Edward Corbett worked there, often in abstract or semi-abstract idioms that answered the same landscape the Society had painted in a completely different language. Later, Agnes Martin made Taos her home, and the gallery of her paintings at the Harwood remains one of the most quietly powerful rooms in American art.
Larry Bell, Fraction #2774. View Work
Ann Cole, Welcome Home. View Work
Seventy miles to the south, Santa Fe developed its own colony in the same years, and the two towns have been in conversation ever since. In 1921, five young painters in Santa Fe, Will Shuster, Fremont Ellis, Józef Bakoś, Walter Mruk and Willard Nash, formed Los Cinco Pintores and brought a looser, more modern energy to the capital's art scene. Where the Taos founders were academically trained and focused on the Pueblo, the Santa Fe painters were younger and more experimental. Together they made northern New Mexico one of the most important regional art centers in the country, and Santa Fe remains the market where much of this work changes hands today. Both towns hold a central place in the history of Native American and Southwest art.
The best place to see both chapters side by side is the Harwood Museum of Art, part of the University of New Mexico. Founded in 1923, while the Society was still active, it holds work by five of the Taos Six, including Victor Higgins' Winter Funeral, which Higgins gave to the museum and hung himself. A short walk away, the Couse-Sharp Historic Site preserves the homes and studios of two founders, along with a research center devoted to the Society.
The museum itself grew out of the colony. Burt Harwood, a painter who had studied at the Académie Julian a decade before Phillips, settled in Taos with his wife Lucy, and their home became the town's first library and a gathering place for artists. The Harwood Foundation was established in 1923 with Phillips and Higgins on its founding board, and the University of New Mexico acquired the museum in 1935. Nearby, the Taos Art Museum occupies the adobe home and studio that the Russian painter Nicolai Fechin built between 1927 and 1933, and its collection centers on the Society's painters.
For collectors, the Taos Society of Artists remains one of the foundations of American Western art, and its market reflects that standing. Major canvases by the founders sell at the highest levels, particularly well-known compositions with Native American subjects. Yet many of these artists also painted smaller studies and landscapes that remain accessible to collectors at more moderate levels, and they carry the same hand and the same light.
The later members and the Taos Moderns offer another route into the field. Painters such as Walter Ufer and E. Martin Hennings produced some of the most luminous work associated with Taos, while modernists such as Dasburg, Bisttram, Ribak and Brett reward collectors drawn to the colony's second chapter. Building a collection across both generations shows how the same valley could inspire academic realism and abstraction within a single lifetime.
When we evaluate Taos paintings, we look first at how a work fits the artist's documented practice: subject, palette, period and scale. Research resources have improved considerably. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West, which holds Sharp's studio collection, publishes an online catalogue of his work, and the Couse-Sharp Historic Site maintains archives that shed light on both founders. Signatures and exhibition labels matter, but they carry weight only when they agree with the painting itself.
The appeal of this work has never rested on history alone. The Taos painters were trying to capture something specific: the weight of adobe walls in late light, the blue of the mountains behind the Pueblo, the gold of cottonwoods along the river in autumn, the stillness of a winter morning in the valley. A century later, those qualities still reward close looking, and they explain why the colony that began with a broken wheel continues to draw painters and collectors to the same small town.