Walter Ufer

Walter Ufer was a leading member of the group of artists who worked in Taos, New Mexico in the early twentieth century, painting the landscape and native inhabitants of the Southwest in a naturalistic manner. Ufer was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to German immigrant parents. His father was a gunsmith with a talent for engraving, and he encouraged his son's interest in art. Ufer apprenticed to a commercial lithographer and finished his training in Dresden, Germany, working as a printer and engraver. Deciding to pursue a career as a painter, he enrolled in two art schools there, and later continued his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and at Smith's Academy, another Chicago art school. He became a teacher at Smith's Academy and worked as a commercial illustrator while establishing himself as a portrait painter. In 1911, Ufer returned to Germany to study in Munich for two years; he also traveled and painted in Paris, Italy, and North Africa.

In 1914, Ufer and fellow Chicago painter Victor Higgins (1884–1949) were encouraged to paint in Taos, New Mexico, by Chicago art supporter Carter Harrison Jr., who became an important patron. In 1917, Ufer was invited to join the Taos Society of Artists, founded two years earlier to promote the work of artists who depicted the region's setting and inhabitants naturalistically. That same year, Ufer settled permanently in Taos. Until the Great Depression, his paintings brought him honors and a steady income. Meticulously detailed, they presented Native American subjects realistically as contemporary figures in a landscape of bright light and brilliant color.

An active socialist and outspoken critic of social injustice, Ufer ultimately alienated Harrison, but he found another staunch supporter in William Henry Klauer, a wealthy businessman from Dubuque, Iowa. Nonetheless, during the depression the painter's fortunes fell with those of the art market, and his success was also eroded by chronic alcoholism and indebtedness. Ufer died in poverty at the age of sixty-one. Today, he is acknowledged as one of the most important artists to emerge from the early decades of the Taos art colony.