Road of a Morning

Gustave Baumann

The following quote was found in Baumann's handwritten manuscripts:

"As something having in it the presence of all the colors of a crisp autumn day, Brown County, Indiana, is perhaps very well named. The colors are one of those obvious facts that delight the soul of the artist not yet concerned with the need for abstracting inner meaning from outer appearance. At least it was so in my day and happy days they were. While those most convenient rail fences to take palette scrapings are gone, for all I know some of the paint rags may still be hiding under bramble bushes as a reminder that some artist sat here a long time ago who packed up and left in a hurry to be back in time for lunch at Mother Ferguson's in Nashville."

Gustave Baumann was born in Magdeburg, Germany on 27 June 1881. Ten years later his family immigrated to the US, settling in Chicago. In 1896, Baumann began working in the commercial art field while saving money to study in Germany. After returning from Munich in December 1905 where he studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Baumann worked again in commercial art to support his family. In 1909, he discovered Brown County, Indiana where life was inexpensive and he could stay for three months. He produced a series of small format color woodcuts featuring the people and places of Brown County and then produced five large format color woodcuts.

His woodcuts were accepted by the committee for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition and he won a gold medal in 1916. Baumann headed east to Wyoming, New York in 1917 and taught at a summer school. From there he headed to Provincetown Massachusetts, and New York City before returning to set up his studio in Wyoming. The southwest beckoned and he headed west in May 1918, stopping in Taos for the summer and fall. His funds were low and he needed to head back to Chicago but first stopped at the new art museum in Santa Fe to see an exhibition of his woodcuts. The rest, as they say, is history.