Herndon Davis: Painting Colorado History 1901–1962

Description

He painted Colorado’s history as it happened — and this is the first collection of his life’s work. Herndon Davis (1901–1962) — artist and journalist — dedicated himself to depicting the landmarks and personalities of Colorado: mining towns, frontier settlements, the faces that shaped the West. Craig Leavitt and Thomas J. Noel’s landmark book is both his biography and the first-ever gathering of most of his paintings.

Published by the University Press of Colorado to coincide with the Denver Public Library’s 2016 exhibition, the book pairs a richly researched life story with a catalog of nearly two hundred paintings — tracing Davis’s development as an artist, his working methods, and his role in shaping Colorado’s cultural identity, preserving in paint a world that was vanishing even as he recorded it.

For lovers of Western art, Colorado history, and regional Americana, this is an essential volume: the definitive portrait of an artist who made his state’s past visible — beautiful, scholarly, and long overdue.

Herndon Davis (1901–1962) spent his life painting Colorado’s history as it happened — and this landmark book by Craig Leavitt and Thomas J. Noel is both his biography and the first-ever collection of most of his life’s work. An artist and journalist, Davis dedicated himself to depicting the major landmarks and personalities of Colorado history, from mining towns and frontier settlements to the faces that shaped the West.
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nPublished by the University Press of Colorado to coincide with the Denver Public Library’s 2016 exhibition of Davis’s work, the book pairs a richly researched life story with a catalog of nearly two hundred of his paintings. Leavitt and Noel trace Davis’s development as an artist, his working methods, and his role in shaping Colorado’s cultural identity — preserving, in paint, a world that was vanishing even as he recorded it.
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nFor lovers of Western art, Colorado history, and regional Americana, this is an essential volume: the definitive portrait of an artist who made his state’s past visible. A beautiful, scholarly, and long-overdue tribute to a painter who belonged to Colorado completely.