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Lot Essay
Frank Sauerwein began his short artistic career as a pupil of his father. After much encouragement at an early age, he moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia to study at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1891, because of his ill health due to tuberculosis, his doctor suggested he move to Denver. There he met Charles Craig, who encouraged Sauerwein to travel with him on his sojourns to the Ute Indian Reservation near Colorado Springs. They sketched and painted the natives and landscapes of the area and were encouraged to travel further, throughout Arizona and New Mexico.
Sauerwein recorded in his paintings naturalistic renditions of Indian life and the surrounding landscape in which they lived. He quickly gained recognition and respect from his fellow artists for his ability to capture the fine detail and pure light of the Southwest, in addition to the ways of the native cultures. Increasingly weak from his illness, Sauerwein permanently left the Southwest in 1910 and traveled east in search of a cure. In response to his departure, this sentiment was recorded in the Taos Valley News in April of that same year: "Sauerwein, whose presence was hoped for here this Spring by his Taos friends, has given up for Taos this year but expects to go East. All his Taos friends send him good wishes." It is widely believed that if Sauerwein had lived, he would have been one of the founders of the Taos Art Colony in 1915.
In Water Carriers, Arizona, Sauerwein paints two native figures struggling up a well-worn path on a steep, dry hillside. The sun drenched landscape and the bright, clear sky highlights the harshness of life in the arid deserts of the Southwest. The low vegetation and the scattered white clouds are the only indication of relief from this extreme dessication. It is exactly this honest representation of the elements of nature for which Sauerwein's reputation was made.
Sauerwein recorded in his paintings naturalistic renditions of Indian life and the surrounding landscape in which they lived. He quickly gained recognition and respect from his fellow artists for his ability to capture the fine detail and pure light of the Southwest, in addition to the ways of the native cultures. Increasingly weak from his illness, Sauerwein permanently left the Southwest in 1910 and traveled east in search of a cure. In response to his departure, this sentiment was recorded in the Taos Valley News in April of that same year: "Sauerwein, whose presence was hoped for here this Spring by his Taos friends, has given up for Taos this year but expects to go East. All his Taos friends send him good wishes." It is widely believed that if Sauerwein had lived, he would have been one of the founders of the Taos Art Colony in 1915.
In Water Carriers, Arizona, Sauerwein paints two native figures struggling up a well-worn path on a steep, dry hillside. The sun drenched landscape and the bright, clear sky highlights the harshness of life in the arid deserts of the Southwest. The low vegetation and the scattered white clouds are the only indication of relief from this extreme dessication. It is exactly this honest representation of the elements of nature for which Sauerwein's reputation was made.