E. Irving Couse

Eanger Irving Couse was born in Saginaw, Michigan, and early on became interested in Native Americans, sketching members of the Chippewa tribe who lived near his childhood home. He studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1883 and then at the National Academy of Design in New York City. In 1886 he traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian. Couse married in the late 1880s and his wife, Virginia Walker, soon convinced him to visit her family’s ranch in southern Washington State so that he could spend time studying and painting the Native American tribes in the region; they returned for a longer visit in 1896. Couse first visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1902. Enamored of the area and fascinated by Pueblo Indian culture, he began spending summers there, eventually helping to found the Taos Society of Artists. He moved there permanently in the late 1920s. His images of Native Americans became widely known through calendars distributed by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Company.