Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
The Gossip
William Penhallow Henderson (born Medford, MA 1877-died Tesuque, NM 1943)
ca. 1922
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 16 1/4 x 20 1/4 in. (41.3 x 51.4 cm.)
- Culture
- Indians of North America
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Arvin Gottlieb
- 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
In The Gossip, William Penhallow Henderson focused on the distinctive shapes of the southwestern landscape. The outlines of the women’s forms echo the swelling hills and rounded Pueblo architecture. Henderson was a noted modernist painter who drew inspiration for his intensely colored canvases from the postimpressionist and cubist styles that he first saw in Paris. The dark values and edgy colors in The Gossip help to evoke the isolation and claustrophobia of communities scattered throughout the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico.
