Eanger Irving Couse, (1866-1936)

Watching 30 x 36in framed 41 x 47in

Watching
signed 'E.I. COUSE -' (lower right)
oil on canvas
30 x 36in
framed 41 x 47in
Painted circa 1916.

Provenance
Private collection, Phoenix, Arizona.
Sale, Butterfields, Los Angeles and San Francisco, California and American Paintings and Sculpture, June 9, 2002, lot 8087 (as 'Hunting Fowl').
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, no. W-0426.
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

Exhibited
Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University, Visions of the Southwest from the Diane and Sam Stewart Art Collection, February 11, 2009 - July 3, 2009.
Salt Lake City, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West, February 15 – August 11, 2013.

We wish to thank Virginia Couse Leavitt for her kind assistance in cataloguing this lot. This painting will be included in her forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.

One of the Taos Society of Artists founders and first president, Eanger Irving Couse was able to capture romantic and even mystical qualities of his subjects and their surroundings, while painting with a French educated sense of anatomy and gesture and a heightened interest in the details and individualism of his subjects.

In Watching, Couse presents a Navajo hunter in full feather headdress as he intently watches a flock of birds coming in to land on a pond. The figure clutches a bow and arrows in his left hand while he casually drapes his right hand over a tree branch, leaning forward to get a better look at the fowl, and perhaps to camouflage himself from their view. The painting's color palette is dominated by the golden orange-brown leaves on the tree surrounding the figure and blanketing the ground beneath his feet. The boulders along the shore and the stands of trees across the pond match this singular color palette but in a muted way that creates the effect of atmosphere and distance. Even the figure himself is painted in a golden-brown skin tone, with red and brown highlights punctuating his clothing and the headdress feathers. Depictions of Native American hunters in an autumnal forest is a motif Couse returned to multiple times in addition to the present work including in Indian Hunter (1902) and Mountain Hunter (1905).