Pima Indian

Additional Information

Provenance:
Owings-Dewey Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Jackson Hole Art Auction, Jackson, WY, 2011
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Private collection, Texas

Literature:
Maynard Dixon: Artist of the West, Wesley M. Burnside, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, 1974: p. 183. (Listed as #582 on Maynard Dixon’s master painting list.)

After Maynard Dixon moved to Tucson, Arizona, he made a series of visits to surrounding Native American communities in the winter of 1939-40. The trip put him in contact with Pima and Papago Indians. Dixon and his wife, painter Edith Hamlin, attended ceremonies and rodeos, and they painted and made sketches of much of what they witnessed. Descendants of the Hohokam, the Pima people, also known as Akimel O’odham, have lived in central Arizona for centuries. Pima Indian, from 1940, was directly inspired by those winter trips.

Dixon’s move to Arizona was largely due to his deteriorating health, which required a drier climate. Prior to the move, the artist and his wife were living in San Francisco, where they had strong ties—Dixon survived the earthquake there in 1906 and helped give the Golden Gate Bridge its famous color—but the weather took a toll on his lungs. When they finally made the choice to uproot their lives from the Bay Area in 1939, they held a large studio sale that was covered in the local newspapers: “Last week brought a closing…of one of San Francisco’s well-established artistic landmarks. The closing is that of Maynard Dixon’s studio at 728 Montgomery Street. Dixon, who has for years been one of San Francisco’s most distinguished muralists and painters of Western life, is leaving this city after 30 years residence, to set up shop somewhere in the desert.” Dixon would call Arizona’s desert home until his death in 1946.

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