Tombstone Epitaph

Gustave Baumann

An alternative title to this piece is "The Careless Eighties," perhaps referring to the haphazard western development boom of the 1880s in which towns rose and fell with equal rapidity. Baumann was intrigued by these crumbling monuments to the American West, and in "Tombstone Epitaph" he's taken his sketched observations from a trip through Arizona and arranged them in organized chaos--much like the Wild West--on the sheet.

Chamberlain notes in In a Modern Rendering: The Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann: 'At the end of March 1928, Baumann wrote home to his wife Jane: "Tonight your wandering boy is back in Tuscon with a new pair of shoes and the first batch of sketches including nine fragments of Tombstone so I feel better..." Some of those fragments appear in the editioned woodcut: depictions of the famous Bird Cage Theater, a street sign for Tough Nut Street, a headstone from Boothill Graveyard, a sulfuret mine in the upper left, and the Cochise County Courthouse in the upper right.'