The Art And Life Of W. Herbert Dunton, 1878-1936

JULIE SCHIMMEL

Publication: Published for the Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas by the University of Texas Press, Austin, 1984, Austin

First edition. 4to. Blue cloth, titles stamped in gilt on the spine, light green front and rear endpapers, 268 pp., frontispiece, preface, introduction, numerous illustrations in both black & white and in color, plates, bibliography, photographic credits, painting index, index. "In 1912, William Herbert Dunton gave up a lucrative career as a magazine and book illustrator for New York publishers and moved to Taos, New Mexico, where he founded with five other artists the famed Taos Society of Artists. From childhood he had been enamored of the West. Born and reared in Maine, Dunton made his first trip west in 1896 when he was just eighteen. While he was eventually to decide that the rigors of cowboy life were too much for him, from this point forward the West would be central to his life and art, so much so that his bride found that her honeymoon suite was a Montana bunkhouse.

Unlike his fellow Taos artists who painted either the Pueblo Inidan or Hispanic people, Dunton stuck with his favorite themes, western ‘old timers’ and wildlife. In time, his paintings gained a measure of popularity, especially in Texas and Oklahoma, although Dunton collectors were wide-ranging, including Douglas Fairbanks, Franklin Roosevelt, and his most important patron, H. J. Lutcher Stark, of Orange, Texas. Following Mr. Stark’s death in 1965, his wife, Nelda C. Stark, founded the Stark Museum of Art in Orange. The museum holds the largest collection of Dunton paintings and illustrations. Fine, bright copy in a lightly rubbed dust jacket with a small closed tear to top edge of the front cover and two small closed tears to the top edge of the rear cover.