Eanger IRVING COUSE (1866-1936) ✿

Eanger Irving Couse was an American artist and a founding member and first president of the Taos Society of Artists. Was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He began to draw as a child, often sketching the Chippewa Indians of his hometown.  He liked to listen to the stories told about the Indians, an interest which heralded his later paintings.

Couse studied at the Chicago Art Institute, and later in Paris, in 1884, at the Julien Academy and the School of Beaux Arts.  He became the favorite pupil of William Bouguereau and won numerous awards as a student.
In 1889, he married Virginia Walker, an American art student he met in Paris.  In 1890, they returned to America and lived at her family's ranch in Oregon and in New York.Couse made many paintings of the Northwest Indians during his years in Oregon.
In 1901, at the invitation of Joseph Henry Sharp, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, the Couses traveled to Taos and immediately fell in love with the Southwest.Each year after that, they would summer in Taos and return to New York, where he would finish the paintings he started in Taos.  In 1903, Couse went to Arizona, where he produced his rare paintings of the Hopi Indians. By 1928, the Couses had decided to permanently live in Taos.  Couse became very active in the local art scene, becoming one of the six "Taos Founders" of the Taos Society of Artists, a group of legendary artists whose influence is still strongly felt in the art world today.

His works are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Milwaukee Art Center, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Philbrook Art Center, the Gilcrease Institute of Art, and the Museum of New Mexico, among numerous other collections both public and private.