The War Bonnet

Born in Saginaw, Michigan, not far from the Ojibwe people, a young E. Irving Couse developed an interest in Indigenous cultures and an early ambition to paint the Native American peoples of the United States. He received his formal artistic training in Paris, at the Académie Julian, and moved back and forth between the United States and France over the next several years before his first visit to Taos in 1902.  He set up a home and studio and became a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists in 1915. The War Bonnet features a model from Taos Pueblo considering a feather headdress with a clay pot beside him. His attire comes from the Great Plains region while the pot resembles the work from the Zia Pueblo of the Southwest. Couse tended to mix dress and accoutrements from various Indigenous cultures, spurred by an enthusiasm among the American public and especially collectors for relics of American Indian culture. In this period, tourism boomed and visitors from the eastern United States made up more and more of the market for Native-made goods. Couse’s paintings of Native Americans were reproduced in calendars by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway to advertise the Southwest as a tourist destination.