EANGER IRVING COUSE 1866-1936
A Vision of the Past, 1913
Oil on canvas, 59 X 59" (149.86 x 149.86 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 919-0-501

E. Irving Couse, who became an Academician at the National Academy of Design in 1911, worked within the European traditions practiced in the institutions he attended: The Art Institute of Chicago (1882), the National Academy of Design (1883-85), the Acad6mie Julian (1886-91), and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1891). This background served him well, and by the time he had completed A Vision of the Past, his paintings had sold in major New York galleries, had been purchased by national museums, and had been accepted in competitive exhibitions in Paris salons, international expositions, and American painting annuals. Couse routinely garnered awards, including the Second Altman Prize at the National Academy of Design in 1916 for A Vision of the Past.
In the academic tradition, paintings were based on careful preparatory work intended to place realistic detail at the service of noble subjects. Exemplary of this process, Couse relied on photographs of Taos Native Americans when creating A Vision of the Past. Three photographs, one of Ben Lujan and children, another of Jerry Mirabal in a feather headdress, and a third of Francisco Gornez, served as models for the first three figures from left to right. The photograph of Ben Lujan and children demonstrates "squaring," a traditional academic technique of using a gridwork overlay to transfer a small study image to a larger canvas for the final painting.
Couse had routinely painted peasant subjects during the first years of his career, imbuing rural subjects with the simplicity and dignity fundamental to lives based in nature and the land. Couse found the same noble attributes in Native American life, while observing the Northwest tribes in the 1890s. Upon visiting Taos in 1902, and subsequently establishing a summer residence there in 1906, the Pueblo people became the central subject of his art.
In 1916, Couse met J. Stuart Blackton, a movie producer who intended to make a film based on the novel, The Captain of Gray Horse Troop, by Hamlin Garland. When Garland and Couse met, they further envisioned a jointly created book which would include paintings by Couse illustrating modern reservation life. Couse wrote Blackton, commenting that artist and writer together hoped "to remove the misconception and contempt in which the Indian has been held, and to show that they are human beings worthy of consideration and a place in the sun." Further, the book would portray the "whole history of the vanishing race." Couse was to contribute fifteen subjects to this ambitious project, including one described as "Dreams of a Captive Race, group on hilltop seeing visions of ancient Buffalo Hunt in sky." A Vision of the Past, based on several sketches created earlier in 1913, was the visualization of this scene, although neither the movie nor the book was ever realized.
In A Vision of the Past, Couse contrasted the past and present, suggesting that the future held little promise for tribal culture. In doing so, he contributed to a tradition of imagery first popular in the 1830s, that of the vanishing race of "doomed" Native Americans. As had others before him, Couse presented his subjects standing on barren land at water's edge, symbolically indicating that Native American culture was coming to an end. Equally typical, the ages of man are suggested by the static figures in the foreground: a seated boy and three male adults of varying maturity and status. Couse intensifies the poignancy of these figures by contrasting them to the visionary forms in the background, who are in the thrall of a buffalo hunt. By the twentieth century, the active, independent life of the warrior-hunter, in which the hunter kills his prey and supports his tribe, can only be found in an ephemeral formation in the clouds.

JULIE SCHIMMEL