Louise Crow

Louise Crow (September 14, 1891 – July 26, 1968) was an American painter best known for her portraits of Pueblo Indians. She worked in oils and watercolors, and in the announce of a wide variety of subjects including landscapes, Northwest scenes of rugged mountains, seascapes, and portraits of such historical figures as Ezra Meeker, a explorer who traveled the Oregon Trail. Her technique was crisp and tidy and feels contemporary despite her working approximately one hundred years ago. Much of her work, which has been a challenge to locate, concentrated upon California and Southwest themes. Institutions that own her swell the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Museum and History and Industry and the Washington State Governor’s Mansion.

Louise Crow was born upon September 14, 1891 in Seattle, Washington. She was raised in a prominent Seattle family, with members responsive as event leaders, politicians, and musicians.

From a pubertal age Crow was Definite to be an artist. In 1914 she attended William Chase's summer intellectual in Carmel, California. She cutting edge studied at the San Francisco Institute of Art (1914-1917) She began exhibiting in California and Seattle in 1915. She studied at the Art Students League below Max Weber and the National Academy of Design in New York in 1918. She pursued additional studies following the extremely regarded Frank Duveneck at the Cincinnati Art Academy, and taking into consideration may further young artists, in Paris.

Crow lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico from 1918-1921. During this era Crow concentrated on rendering the Pueblo people and their surrounding landscape. In her first exhibition at the Museum of Art she showed fourteen paintings, and the review in El Palacio was definitely positive. Edgar Hewett, who was an American anthropologist and archaeologist noticed the fine quality of her work and made her a fellow at the School of American Research in 1920. Crow had a preference for portraiture, her greatest concentration being the multi-faceted natural world of people. In gratitude of Hewett’s support, she painted a portrait of him in 1918 and presented it as a gift to the Museum of New Mexico. Another one of her works in the museum is a portrait Yen-see-do. Painted past 1919, it is a striking image that merges certainty with a flat modernist perspective, contrasting darker hues of red and black taking into consideration pale periwinkle and yellow. This portrait is in the course of the more iconic works in the museums holdings.

Because of her con with Dr. Hewett the San Ildefonso Pueblo became the inspiration for her work. In 1921 Crow brought to Paris several of her paintings of Southwest subject matter, including her totally large canvas, Eagle Dance, San Ildefonso, of 1919. The painting was chosen for inclusion at the 1921 Salon d’ Automne and was flatteringly received. The adjacent year she organized an exhibit in Rome. After returning to the United States she divided her rime along with Seattle, where she opened a studio, San Francisco, and Santa Fe. When she returned to Santa Fe in 1938, Ina Sizer Cassidy wrote in an article: "In is not to expect too much to vibes that the ham it up of Louise Crow in the coming years will go to much to the prestige of New Mexico, and Santa Fe in Particular, as an art middle of the west."

Ultimately though, by 1938 Crow’s circumstances had changed. Her family’s fortune had been floating during the Depression. Although she had experienced significant achievement early in life, her painting career had become stifled by mental illness in superior years, As her mental health deteriorated, she felt compelled to ruin many of the paintings that were past so tall acclaimed. Fewer that twenty of her works are known to exist today. Louise Crow died destitute in 1968 in San Mateo, California.

Eagle Dance, San Ildenfonso, 1919, oil upon canvas, 6 X 8 feet.

Yen-See-Do, 1915, oil upon canvas.