ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION | AMERICAN MASTERS

Leon Gaspard

The son of a retired Russian officer and fur trader, Leon Gaspard studied art in Odessa and Moscow before enrolling in the Julian Academy in Paris at age seventeen. Gaspard married American ballet student Evelyn Adell, with whom he traveled widely through Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. Sketches made during his travels were the basis for many of his paintings. The Gaspards settled in Taos, New Mexico, in 1918. The artist loved the indigenous culture that reminded him of his native country. Although most of the established members of the Taos Society of Artists received him coldly, Gaspard found commercial success using the New Mexican landscape and its people. Noted by Gaspard in a 1921 letter to members of what is now Rockford Art Museum as "one of my finest and most important canvases," Russian Forest was inspired by a trip to his Russian homeland shortly after his move to Taos.