Homer Boss

Homer Boss (1882-1956)

Born in Blandford, Massachusetts, Homer Boss was a much praised painter of Western scenes and Indian portraits. Working in New York City in the early 20th-century, he was known for breaking away from 19th-century academic standards. He studied with Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase at the Chase School in New York, and in Philadelphia as a student of Thomas Anschutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was part of "The Fifteen Group," students of Henri including Edward Hopper, who exhibited together and rebelled against the strictures of the National Academy.

Beginning 1925, Boss went regularly to New Mexico. He completed a series of Indian portraits and landscapes that likely included Arizona as he had a reputation for the skill of his desert landscapes. Howard Devree, in a review for the New York Times Art Digest, March 1, 1933, wrote that Boss "has succeeded in presenting some of the amazing desert formations, and has produced cloud effects, contours of rock and brilliance of color calculated to cause the dwellers among artificial canyons of steel and stone to raise both eyebrows." (Dawdy 44-45) In 1933, he settled permanently on a ranch in Santa Cruz, New Mexico, where he died of emphysema of 1956.