Provenance: Private collection Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, 1985 Collection of Rollin W. King, Dallas, TX, 1985 Santa Fe Art Auction, Santa Fe, NM, 2015 Santa Fe Art Auction, Santa Fe, NM, 2016 Private collection, Nevada Although it is not obvious by this painting, Lavern Nelson Black sought out the Southwest after a medical diagnosis encouraged him to live in a drier and warmer climate. The Midwest artist, raised in Wisconsin and Illinois, had previously been West on assignment for Chicago newspapers, so when he was told he needed dry air he knew which direction to head. By 1925, Black was in Taos, New Mexico, and he was painting the Taos Pueblo, its people and the surrounding landscape. Many of his paintings were purchased by the Santa Fe Railroad to advertise the culture and beauty of the American West, which, in turn, helped establish the mythic qualities of the Southwest to East Coasters. Black also worked in Phoenix, where he completed murals with Oscar E. Berninghaus. In Taos Winter Morning, Black’s strengths as an artist are on full view: loose brushwork paired with areas applied with a palette knife, a modernist sense of design and composition, and a complex arrangement of figures and horses. Black frequently painted from life, and this painting conveys a great deal of the active and energetic brushwork in his outdoor paintings. One small and noteworthy detail in this work is the small dog painted at the horse’s feet. In many of Black’s most famous paintings, dogs are painted within the scenery or in the clamber of movement and life in the Taos Pueblo.