Portrait of E #2

Cady Wells met Elizabeth Boyd White Van Cleave, or E. Boyd as she preferred, in 1931, and the two would become close friends. She would invited Wells to be a member of the modernist exhibiting group the Rio Grande Painters, formed in 1934 shortly after Wells decided to become a painter. She also advised Wells in collecting New Mexican santos, all of which he gave to the Museum of New Mexico in 1951. His Portrait of E #2 is the second in a series of portraits he created of her in the early 1950s. The contour portrait, scratched into the mottled gouache, resembles the work of Georges Rouault. Wells had come to admire Rouault's paintings of Christian iconography in a modernist style suggestive of stained glass Wells. Wells approached his portrait of E. Boyd as a religious icon, akin to the series of Santos painting he was producing at the time.