An Eye for the West: Peaches Gilbert and the American Southwest

For more than forty years, from her home in Santa Fe, Peaches Gilbert has assembled one of the most important collections of Western American art still in private hands.

At its center is Eanger Irving Couse, a founder of the Taos Society of Artists. Eleven of his oils are displayed here — Drilling Turquoise, The Blanket Mender, Preparing to Signal, Indian in Moonlight, and seven more from his Taos years. Rarely are so many works by one artist offered from a single private collection. The Blanket Mender was published in Nicholas Woloshuk’s 1976 monograph; The Sun Worshippers hung in Couse’s 1967 retrospective at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, lent by the artist’s son.

Surrounding them are others who made the West their subject — Alfred Jacob Miller’s 1837 fur-trade scene, Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains and a California peak, Maynard Dixon’s Sierra, E. Martin Hennings’s Taos valley, Fremont Ellis’s autumn aspens, Tonita Peña’s San Ildefonso corn dancers, Gustave Baumann’s woodblocks, and two paintings by William R. Leigh.