Walter Ufer was born into a German immigrant family in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1893 he sailed to Germany to study art at the Royal Academy in Dresden returning to America three years later, and eventually settling in Chicago in 1900 where he worked as a designer for an engraving firm. By 1911, Ufer had saved enough money to travel to Europe. He and his wife spent two years painting and studying in France, Italy, Germany, North Africa, Sweden and Denmark. The exhibition of Ufer's European works in Chicago on his return was a success, attracting the attention of Mayor Carter H. Harrison, Jr. who, with several of his business associates had for several years sponsored visits for young Chicago artists to Taos. Harrison sponsored Ufer's first trip to New Mexico in 1914. Ufer traveled via Denver as a guest of the Santa Fe Railroad, whose management was eager for artists to paint the American West in order to encourage public travel. On his arrival in Taos, Ufer was so impressed with the landscape and people that he remarked: "God's country! I expect to live and die here" (Patricia Janis Broder, Taos: A Painter's Dream, Boston, Massachusetts, 1980, p. 212); and it was in Taos that he found the creative and aesthetic inspiration that he needed to develop the originality of his mature painting style.

Ufer was invited to become a member of the Taos Society of Artists in 1917, and he exhibited with the other members from then until the group was disbanded in 1927. Although Taos was an ideal venue for Ufer artistically, his active social conscience was affected by the plight of the local Indian population. By the time Ufer first visited New Mexico in 1914, the Taos Indians were undergoing huge social change. The old way of life, revolving around the cultivation of corn was becoming outdated in an era of industrialization. Many of the Pueblo Indians were forced to seek employment in the village, but they were uneducated and unskilled, and had to take menial jobs or work as servants. Patricia Janis Broder writes of Ufer: ". . . he focused his efforts upon painting the pains of cultural transition. He painted them as passive, dejected people, second class citizens in the white man's world" (Broder, I. 215). Ufer always worked outdoors which enabled him to concentrate on capturing the New Mexico landscape in all its dramatic variations of light and color. Dr. Rick Stewart writes: Ufer, in his best work, went beyond the surface of things to expose the undercurrents of human feeling. Unlike so many of his Toas counterparts, he seems to have been struck by the irony of the Indian's lot in his artistic paradise, and he used the language of paint to argue more eloquently than he could have done with words.

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton