Victor Higgins
1884-1949
Victor Higgins was born into a farming family in Shelbyville, Indiana. By the age of nine he was determined to become an artist, following a brief lesson and much inspiration from an itinerant painter. At fifteen he left for Chicago to study at the Art Institute and the Chicago Academy of Fine Art. In 1910 he travelled to Europe, first training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and later in Munich under Haas von Hyeck, where he met fellow artist Walter Ufer.
Higgins returned to Chicago to teach at the Academy and in 1914 accepted a commission to paint the landscape at Taos, which was then gaining recognition as a notable, if remote, artist colony. He and his traveling companion, Walter Ufer, were so entranced by the town and its people that they chose to stay. Both artists were invited to join the Taos Society of Artists in 1917
Higgins, unlike many of the other Taos artists, never worked as an illustrator. He was considered a painter's painter and developed a highly innovative, lustrously rich, modern style. Higgins captured the abstracted beauty of New Mexico, rendering the landscape without sentimentality or romanticism.
Higgins was one of only nineteen artists invited to show at the Museum of Modern Art's second exhibition in 1929. He was elected an Academician of the National Academy of Design in 1935. His paintings are represented in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Butler Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and other museums across the United States. The artist's last years were devoted to creating small landscapes on location, "Little Gems", which are considered the full realization of a true master's vision.
Actively seeking works by Victor Higgins.
