Gerald Cassidy (artist)

Gerald Cassidy (November 10, 1869 – February 12, 1934) was an early 20th-century artist, muralist and designer who lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Cassidy was born in Covington, Kentucky upon November 10, 1869 as Ira Dymond Gerald Cassidy. He studied art at the Institute of Mechanical Arts under Frank Duveneck, and the Art Students League in New York.

At the similar moment that Cassidy was first finding attainment he contracted a life-threatening lawsuit of pneumonia and was moved to a sanitarium in Albuquerque in 1890. It was here that he first motto the people and places of the American Southwest, the subject thing that he would dedicate his entire life's ham it up to after this point. His first play-act using American Indian and Western subjects was heavily art deco, and a deco edge would remain in his work even as it developed into a more solidly realist style.

Cassidy moved from Albuquerque to Denver to perform as a lithographer. In 1912 he moved and arranged in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he met Edgar L. Hewett, founding director of the Museum of New Mexico. Hewett commissioned him to paint his first mural at the Panama-California International Exposition. He painted the Navajo in works that were primarily transferred to postcards or posters. At the 1915 Panama-California International Exposition in San Diego Cassidy was awarded the gold medal for his murals, the largest rave review he would win in his lifetime. Cassidy with created the mural Dawn of the West and the Parfet Park memorial in Golden, Colorado, where he was an honorary aficionado of the Golden Kiwanis Club.

During the mid-twenties Cassidy traveled in Europe, and his pieces were skillfully thought of by the European public. Pablo Picasso chose one of Cassidy's pieces from a piece of legislation for immersion in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris.

He died on February 12, 1934 hence of turpentine and carbon monoxide poisoning from a newly installed natural gas heater in his studio though working on a mural art project for the arena of the federal building at Santa Fe.

Cassidy's art can be seen at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the El Paso Museum of Art. His piece of legislation is furthermore in Santa Fe at the main state office, Bishop's Lodge, and Hotel La Fonda.