Eanger Irving Couse
 E. Irving Couse was born in 1866 and painted the traditions of the institutions he attended: the Art Institute of Chicago (1882), the National Academy of Design (1883-85), the Academie Julian (1886-91), and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1891). In 1911 he became an Academician at the National Academy of Design and by 1913 had sold in major New York Galleries, had been purchased by national museums and had accepted in international competitive exhibitions. In the academic tradition, his paintings were based on careful preparatory work intended to place realistic detail at the service of noble subjects. Couse relied on photographs of Toas Native Americans for much of his work.
Couse had routinely painted peasant subjects during the first years of his career, imbuing rural subjects with simplicity and dignity fundamental to lives based in nature and the land. Couse found the same noble attributes in Native American life, while observing the Northwest tribes in the 1890’s. Upon visiting Toas in 1902, and subsequently establishing a summer residence there in 1906, the Pueblo people became the central subject of his art.
In 1916, Couse met J. Stuart Blackton, a movie producer who intended to make a film based on the novel The Captain of Gray Horse Troop, by Hamlin Garland. When Garland and Couse met, they further envisioned a jointly created book which would include paintings by Couse illustrating modern reservation life. The intent was to remove the public misconception and contempt in which the Indians had been held and to show that they were human beings worthy of consideration and a place in the sun. The book was also intended to present a whole history of the vanishing race. Couse was to contribute fifteen subjects to this project but neither movie nor book was ever realized, yet the images he rendered tend to symbolize the Native American culture was coming to an end.
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