Original Painting “Blue Fawn” [SOLD]

This painting was completed by Eva Mirabal in 1948.  She titled it “Blue Fawn” and it was painted as a companion to one she titled “Leaping Fawn” which is our Item Number C3982E (click here to view now). Both paintings were painted on beige paper and colors chosen were pastel in tone.

She favored painting small paintings, usually of a single figure, depicting traditional activities in and around Taos Pueblo where she had been born and where she lived most of her life. She had studied at the Santa Fe Indian School under Dorothy Dunn, at the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, and at the Taos Valley Art School, Taos, New Mexico.

Mirabal first began attracting attention for her artwork while a teenager in the late 1930s. At age 19, in 1939, she was singled out for a Chicago gallery show:  "She expresses in every drawing—in every line—a truly feminine tenderness and grace," one critic wrote in the Chicago Union Teacher magazine. "The clean colors, simplicity and good taste make this ageless art truly modern." She was also the only female included in the First National Exhibition of Indian Painting, held at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Condition: very good condition.  It has just been framed with archival materials and UV conservation glass.

Provenance: from a family in Santa Fe who has owned it since it was first painted.

Recommended Reading:  Silverman, Jason. "Drawing From Life: Spurred by the Taos Painters of the 1920s, Taos Pueblo's Eva Mirabal Painted Her Community as She Saw It - and Changed Southwest Art in the Process." Santa Fean (May 2002): 33-36.