Veiled Prophet Float Design: Frontier Stockade
Veiled Prophet Float Design: Frontier Stockade
Oscar Edmund Berninghaus
American, 1874 - 1952
Watercolor and Gouache
12 x 21 1/4 in. (30.5 x 54.0 cm)
Watercolor and gouache over pencil on paper, unsigned. c. 1930
A design for a parade float for St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet pageant, painted by Oscar E. Berninghaus early in his career, before he became one of the founders of the Taos Society of Artists. A log blockhouse crowns a grassy mound on the float bed, while frontiersmen defend the stockade against a war party pressing up the slope. It is a tableau of the westward-frontier stories that the annual autumn parade loved to stage on wheels.
Born in St. Louis in 1874, Berninghaus trained in the city’s commercial lithography houses and took night classes at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. Designs like this one are the bridge between his work as an illustrator and the Western subjects he made his life’s work after his first trip to Taos in 1899. They are a rare record of an ephemeral St. Louis tradition: the floats themselves were built for a single night and then dismantled.
A design for a parade float for St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet pageant, painted by Oscar E. Berninghaus early in his career, before he became one of the founders of the Taos Society of Artists. A log blockhouse crowns a grassy mound on the float bed, while frontiersmen defend the stockade against a war party pressing up the slope. It is a tableau of the westward-frontier stories that the annual autumn parade loved to stage on wheels.
Born in St. Louis in 1874, Berninghaus trained in the city’s commercial lithography houses and took night classes at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. Designs like this one are the bridge between his work as an illustrator and the Western subjects he made his life’s work after his first trip to Taos in 1899. They are a rare record of an ephemeral St. Louis tradition: the floats themselves were built for a single night and then dismantled.
Categories
Oscar Edmund Berninghaus
c. 1915
Oil on Canvas
Oscar Edmund Berninghaus
c. 1920
Oil on Artist's Board
