ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION | AMERICAN MASTERS

Victor Higgins

Victor Higgins was born into a farming family in Shelbyville, Indiana. At age fifteen he left for Chicago to study at the Art Institute and the Chicago Academy of Fine Art, followed by training in Paris and Munich. Upon Higgins returning to Chicago Higgins accepted a commission to paint the landscape of Taos, New Mexico, which was at the time gaining recognition as a notable artist colony. He was so entranced by the town and its people that he chose to stay and in 1915 was invited to join the exclusive Taos Society of Artists.

Higgins was a key member of the Taos Society of Artists. Most Taos artists were illustrators. In contrast to other members, Higgins was strongly influenced by modern, abstract art. He developed a highly innovative, lustrously rich, modern style and was the only artist of the group proficient in watercolor as well as in oil. Gradually, Higgins developed a style that focused on the feeling of a scene rather than the pure recreation of what was there. "The trouble with most people is that they see too much with the eye only and not enough with the inner eye, the emotions," he told an interviewer in 1932. "A painter paints a canvas not because he wants to make a 'picture' so much as that he wants to solve a problem . . . in form, in construction, design if you prefer that term, in color harmonies." He was able to capture the abstracted beauty of New Mexico, rendering a pure landscape absent of sentimentality or romanticism.