Joseph Imhof

Joseph Imhof (1871 - 1955)

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Joseph Imhof was a self-taught lithographer for Currier and Ives in New York City and then became an important documentary painter of Indian life in New Mexico. He is best known for a series of sixty paintings focused on the importance of corn in the culture of the Pueblo Indians.

In 1897, he married Sarah Stuart. They returned to Europe several times and then in 1905 went to the Southwest for the first time to record ceremonies of Pueblo Indians. He built a studio in Albuquerque in 1906 and traveled throughout the region, finally settling in Taos in 1929. He built his studio on the edge of the reservation facing the Sacred Mountain behind the Pueblo. A highly private person, he was referred to by long-time resident and his twenty-year neighbor Mabel Dodge Luhan only as "the Grand Old Man of the Pueblos" (Samuels 244). He collected many Indian artifacts and recorded ethnological information with his paintbrush. He had the first lithography press in Taos, making prints that are of ethnological value, and he also taught lithography.