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Feast Day: San Juan Pueblo
William Penhallow Henderson (born Medford, MA 1877-died Tesuque, NM 1943)
ca. 1921
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 22 x 30 in. (55.9 x 76.3 cm.)
- Culture
- Indians of North America
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Alice H. Rossin in memory of Dr. Joshua C. Taylor
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
William Penhallow “Whippy” Henderson created a rhythmic procession of shapes leading upward and outward from the crowd of villagers at the lower left to the slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The villagers, their houses, the trees and the hills are all part of a unified world summoned by the feast day drummer, whose music seems to radiate through the landscape. Henderson documented an important religious procession in the southwestern pueblo of San Juan, about twenty-five miles north of his home in Santa Fe. He showed the town’s two churches, the small Loretto Chapel and the larger Church of San Juan. Because sketching or photographing such events was forbidden, Henderson would observe them, often from horseback, and then return to his studio and paint from memory.
