Winter Pasture
Winter Pasture
Oscar Edmund Berninghaus
American, 1874 - 1952
Oil on Canvas
20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61.0 cm)
Few painters understood the Taos valley as intimately as Oscar Edmund Berninghaus. A founding member of the Taos Society of Artists, he arrived in New Mexico in 1899 on a railroad commission and never truly left — returning each summer for three decades before settling there permanently in 1925. In that time he became perhaps the most complete chronicler of the land itself: not only its people and ceremonies, but the specific quality of light that falls across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at different seasons, the way a valley floor shifts from gold to amber as winter releases its hold.
Winter Pasture is a mature expression of that knowledge. Horses graze across a broad, frost-thinned meadow, unhurried, dwarfed by the scale of the landscape around them. Pink-budded scrub trees along the middle distance signal the first hesitation of winter — not quite spring, but no longer cold enough to drive the horses in. The Sangre de Cristos rise behind them with snow still clinging to the high peaks, rendered in Berninghaus's characteristically controlled, tonal hand: the mountains are solid and geological where a lesser painter might have made them decorative. The sky — pale blue, clouds moving — gives the painting its breath.
This is Berninghaus at his most confident: the composition expansive but organized, the palette restrained but warm, the subject entirely his own. The painting carries the authority of a man who had watched this valley through every season for fifty years.
Berninghaus's work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Eiteljorg Museum, the Gilcrease Museum, and numerous major Western collections. He remains among the most sought-after of the Taos Society founders.
Oil on canvas. Signed lower left.
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