Taos from the Hillside
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 26 x 29 1/2 inches
Richmond Art Museum Purchase, 1925
Victor Higgins (1884 - 1949)
An itinerant sign painter gave Victor Higgins his first paints in Shelbyville, Indiana. He studied and later taught at the Art Institute and Academy of Fine Arts, Chicago.
From 1910-14, he painted at the Academie de la Grande Chaumier in Paris, and at the Academy in Munich. In Paris he met Walter Ufer, a rough, blunt Chicagoan. Although Higgins' opposite, he shared a mutual antagonism for the academic style. Back in Chicago, Ufer and Higgins found a patron who commissioned both to paint the New Mexico landscape.
Higgins moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1914, joining the Taos Society of Artists in 1915. He exhibited with Jane Peterson in 1925 and with Wayman Adams and Janet Scudder in 1927. He was a guest at the Annual Meeting in 1924.
