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Fremont Ellis, American (1897-1985)
Born in Virginia City, Montana, Fremont Ellis earned a reputation as a New Mexico painter of site-specific landscapes that conveyed his intense feelings for the rich coloration of the Southwest. He was much influenced by American Impressionism and was one of the few newcomer artists of Santa Fe who had been born in the West.
His family had gone to Montana during the Gold Rush, and his father, trained as a dentist, went into theatrical work. As a youngster, Ellis played the drums in his father’s movie theatre. The family traveled all over the county, and the future artist spent much time in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He briefly attended the Art Students League, but decided to return West to the landscape he loved.
He first went to El Paso, Texas, where he taught art and then in Santa Fe joined his friends Willard Nash, Jozef Bakos, Will Shuster, and Walter Mruk. Together they formed the Los Cinco Pintores, modernist-tending artists who had their first of several exhibitions in the Museum of Santa Fe in 1921. However, the group did not stay together very long, as stylistically they went in a variety of directions.
Ellis, considered the “loner” of the group, married and spent a period of time in Espanola, about twenty-five miles north of Santa Fe. Later he settled about ten miles east of Santa Fe in a home that came to be regarded as one of the most beautiful of the haciendas in that area.
From the time he was young, he had developed a great love of the Spanish people of New Mexico. His wife was a member of an old, aristocratic New Mexican family that owned in Santa Fe a large piece of property where the Hilton Inn subsequently was located. Ellis became saddened by what he regarded as the loss of the old ways–the quiet, gentle way of life.
Source:
Peggy and Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West