Leigh

In the paintings of William Robinson Leigh there lives the West of yesterday, the West of the thundering buffalo herd, the West of the great cattle drives. There lives, too, the West of today, the Navajo on the lonely butte, the sweep of mountains, the beauty and color of skies without beginning or end, the emptiness and expanse of the mesa, the nobility of a man and horse.

In his 80's, Mr. Leigh this very day, in his studio at 200 West 57th Street, New York, is still painting of the West he knows and loves, the West into which he first came over four decades ago after having completed his art education in Europe. Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City will show his paintings April 13-24.

Mr. Leigh was the painter chosen to accompany the Carl Akeley expedition to East Africa for the American Museum of Natural History, 1926-27, and the Museum's CarlisleClark expedition to the same locality, 1928. From January, 1932, to 1935, he had charge of the painting of African landscape backgrounds for habitat groups in the Carl Akeley African Hall at the museum. Some of his finest work is immortalized there. His book, "Frontiers of Enchantment," published in 1938, gave an account of his African adventures and was greeted with great critical acclaim.

Mr. Leigh's paintings are in museums and notable private collections in this country and abroad. They will always be treasured for their beauty and for the country and times they so vividly depict.... R. C.

ainlings by LEIGH.. MY AMERICA BY W. R. LEIGH

When I was a small child in Virginia, we had a buffalo (bison) pelt in our house as almost everybody did in those days. I wallowed and rolled on that soft robe that lay on the floor, but not without my imagination being stirred. In our Cassell's Popular Natural History there was a woodcut of bison; the sun was rising behind a big butte, and water was in the foreground. But the bison were rather small and inexact.

I knew the names of most of the animals of the world before I could read, and I listened to my mother breathlessly as she read the writings of Sir Samuel Baker, Livingston, Stanley; I cut out of paper stirring compositions, and drew dramatic animal scenes on my slate. On one of my cuttings an elephant chasing a man on horseback -I won first prize at the Martinsburg County Fair-one dollar. And then, one day my father read the account of the Custer Massacre from the newspaper. This was in 1876, when I was ten years old; it made a tremendous impression on me.

After three years at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, in 1883 I went to Munich to study in the Royal Academy. Professor Raupp, instructor in the antique class, when he saw my drawings submitted for the sake of gaining admission into his class, to my surprise and gratification pronounced them the best he had seen that season.

During my twelve-year stay in Europe I became aware that the motives treated by painters there were such as interested me somewhat mildly; the fashionable Biblical Please turn to page twenty-five.

MY AMERICA Continued from page sixteen

subjects left me cold outside of their treatment. This was sometimes so brilliant that only a stone would remain unmoved; however, I felt that all European subjects had been painted pretty much to death. In America there was a vast field of untouched material pictorial opportunities unsurpassed and brand new as wonderful as any the world had ever seen!

I resolved to paint America.

Older men shrugged. America?

I was advised again in the late eighteen nineties to stay in Europe. Conditions in America, I was told, were exceedingly unfavorable to artists; only pot-boiler painters could exist there.

When I got back to New York-selected as the most likely place in which to exchange my accomplishments for a subsistence I had forty dollars upon which to begin life.

I went to see a man who by report had made a large fortune from the sale of American paintings-chiefly those of George Inness. I showed him photographs of pictures I had painted, one of which had received a silver medal in Munich, and an honorable mention in Paris.

I would turn over my entire output to him for one hundred dollars per month.

"What do you propose to paint?" he asked.

I wanted to go to our West-the Indian and cowboy country.

When I said "West" I noted a look of disapproval; my man shook his head in the negative. He was not interested, but he gave me the address of a man who he thought might be.

I found a huge, dingy brick building on West Broadway; a freight elevator landed me in a bare lobby where wooden boxes were piled to the ceiling on either side. A small boy handed me a small card; would I state my business on the card. I said, "Impossible!" Would he ask the boss to give me five minutes? He disappeared down a long dark aisle between boxes. A squat, broad man of sixty shuffled into view after twenty minutes.

"What do you want?"

In the briefest words possible, I explained my mission and showed my photographs; then I ventured with my proposition. The man had a dreary countenance, and a game eye; his look was baleful.

"What do you want to do in the West?"

"Paint."

"There's nothing to paint in the West."

"Indians," I suggested.

"Who wants pictures of dirty Indians?"

"Landscapes canyons mountains-plains."

"All stage scenery!"

"Animals-bison-horses cattle!"

"There's nothing in America to paint!"

Without another word he turned his back and shuffled away. I walked up Fifth Avenue; the best art dealers in America were showing nothing but European pictures.

I met a painter I knew, and remarked upon this strange fact. He told me there was only one dealer in town who would handle pictures painted by Americans; he made it a rule to take the pictures of only one American at a time.

"How do American artists live, then?" I asked.

"They paint Barbizon pictures peasant girls with wooden shoes, driving sheep, et cetera."

"How about Inness?"

"Oh! he? When he already had one foot in the grave, Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant, the then distinguished French portrait painter, at a banquet given in his honor, told a banker who was lamenting the supposed fact that America had no artists, that he, Constant, had seen the work of a person unknown to him, named George Inness, who in his estimation was the best landscape painter in the world."

Over night Inness became famous, and a mad rush began to buy his pictures; he was soon a rich man.

It was imperative that I earn some money quickly.

I went to Scribner's magazine, and the next day began illustrating for them.

Not until 1906 was I able to get to Laguna, New Mexico, on a study trip. Then I began to realize how right I had been all along in my desire to know and paint America.

I saw Acoma and the Grand Canyon; I knew that some of the most distinctive characteristic dramaticpoetic unique motives in the world were here in this virgin country waiting an adequate hand to do them justice.

Thereafter, I was in the West as often as I could earn enough money to take me there.

What I painted was laughed at by my brother artists, who had not seen the West. According to them my color was ridiculously false, my pictures mere "illustrations."

PAGE TWENTY-FIVE OF ARIZONA HIGHWAYS FOR FEBRUARY, 1948 That last was the stock tag attached to all I did until I produced "The Poisoned Pool."

Two dealers in partnership, Snedecker and Babcock, who were just starting out in the "art game," included me among ten American painters whom they were going to try out, with the intention of "pushing" one. I was the one selected. The business prospered. I earned enough to get by, and gave up illustrating. Scribner's used my painting, "The Great Beyond," in full color on the opening page of their Christmas issue. Mr. August Heckscher bought "The Boomerang Throwers," "The Stampede," "The Maya Historian," but the prices were so low that I could barely subsist. Mr. Snedecker died; Mr. Babcock grew pessimistic. I went to Wyoming and participated in hunting. My forty-six inch canvas of a bear hunt he said he sold for the ridiculously inadequate sum of four hundred dollars.

The first World War came on!

I was reduced to working in a scenic studio. The union workers could not stand my competition and put me out.

Twenty years after I had been collecting studies in various parts of the West and producing more and better pictures than ever before, Babcock was selling less than ever.

Babcock walked up the street with me one day and told me he could have been worth a million dollars had he not wasted so much energy and time on me, but had devoted his time to selling Old Masters. I then told him I would no longer stand in the way of his making that million-I would send him no more pictures. My next picture, "The Happy Hunting Ground," was handled by Rinehart who sold it to Edward Doheny a few days after receiving it for much the biggest sum I had ever obtained. I had seen much of the western life by this time, and painted it the way I saw it, yet sales were few; many people said I painted things that did not exist. Boomerangs, for instance, were confined to Australia; nothing I could say to the contrary counted; they knew. Yet a lot of painters who had laughed at me were going to settle in Taos. Among pictures of mine are "A Navajo Pony," owned by the Duke of Windsor, and a painting of the "Gorilla Sanctuary," owned by the King of Belgium. A painting of "The Grand Canyon" and other of my canvases have been acquired by various museums.

Finally I painted "Custer's Last Fight" and "The Lookout" and had a show at the Grand Central Galleries. Mr. Frank Phillips purchased the two last for his Woolaroc Museum in Oklahoma; later he acquired the "Navajo Fire Dance," the "Westward Ho!" the "Visions of Yesterday," and the "Pocahontas."

All these things did not transpire in an unbroken sequence; there were many interruptions-long gaps. I went to Africa twice for the American Museum of Natural History of New York, and was in charge of the painting for the habitat groups in the African Hall for three years. I did some writing. My wife, Ethel Traphagen, and I have traveled around the world to assemble information, costumes and their accessories, for the benefit of the students of the Traphagen School of Fashion. We assembled objects of art from almost every land for the instruction and inspiration that our pupils would derive from living among fine things.

And together we have been in many parts of the West, and each time with increased love of, and desire, on my part, to recreate as much on canvas as fate will permit, of the glorious land of romance, poetry, drama; of color, charm unique, and glamour unrivaled. On her part, inspiration, buoyancy of spirit, and a rare collection of costumes, rugs, and Navajo and Zuni jewelry has resulted.

My hope is that I may live long enough to paint all the more important subjects which I have laid out to do. I still have not seen all I want to see of our western states, and often we discuss together trips; trips to Montana, to Death Valley, to Jackson's Hole, to Glacier Park, to Bryce Canyon, and so on.

The strange state of mind which led to so many Americans thinking or at least saying that there was nothing to paint in America, was one of the most fantastic anomalies I have ever encountered. For a long time it was inexplicable to me, but I have now my very definite convictions as to the cause. I will, however, not go into that here. Fortunately for America's history and its culture, a class of men has grown up in our western states who cannot be swayed by the sophistries and conventionalities that led to such thinking.

To these men American civilization will be indebted in the future for having appreciated, encouraged, and preserved for posterity records on canvas which will be priceless one day.

We must be glad because they have beheld with their own eyes have experienced and felt the mighty force of the vivid life which is fast vanishing because of its uniqueness, its unexampled riot of all the elements which go to make a great national art tradition because these things have stirred these men to the depths, and imbued their souls with emotions too profound to be quelled or deceived. All America will speak of them with admiration in the future, and all history will applaud their independence, and courage of conviction.

Nothing to paint in America! Was ever more puerile drivel uttered? America affords the most glorious opportunities to writers, sculptors and painters at present in the world; and the best of these the most truly Americanare in our western states. I am preparing a show for the Grand Central Galleries now; there are to be thirty-five to forty new pictures. Many of these are already finished, but many are yet to be executed. Yet the inspiration and enthusiasm never flag, and day in and day out the pictures develop, and the sunlight and thrill of the glorious West never wane.