Ready for the Fiesta

William Penhallow Henderson first visited Santa Fe, New Mexico, as early as the 1880s and made a painting trip to the Southwest in 1904; he relocated to Santa Fe permanently in 1916. Like Victor Higgins and Walter Ufer, Henderson enjoyed the financial support of Chicago industrialists. Unlike his two colleagues, however, Henderson was rejected by the Taos Society of Artists; in response, he formed a Modernist group, the New Mexico Painters, in 1923. Ready for the Fiesta displays Henderson’s reliance on strong, decorative shapes and color, and the flattened picture plane and intensified geometry of the design are a result of his time spent in France studying the work of Paul Cézanne.