Ernest Martin Hennings 1886 - 1956

Private Collection, Texas, circa 1946
By descent in the family to the present owner

Ernest Martin Hennings, a Chicago-based artist, moved to Taos, New Mexico, and in 1924 became the youngest member of the Taos Society of Artists. In Along the Canyon Road, mounted Native Americans, going in opposite directions, pass through a stand of aspen trees in full autumn regalia. The picture is strongly evocative of the ethos of the Taos school with its regional topics and the brilliant palette associated with the colors of the American southwest. What is not so apparent at first are the enduring effects of Hennings' years of academic art training in Chicago and Munich, Germany. Altogether invisible is the fascinating back story of the links between Chicago, the German-American Midwest art community and a trio of Taos Society artists, Victor Higgins, Walter Ufer and E. Martin Hennings.

Hennings was born in Penns Grove, New Jersey, to German immigrants from Schleswig-Holstein, who proceeded further west to Chicago when the boy was two years old. A child of the city, Hennings was twelve or thirteen years old when he and a friend wandered one day into the Art Institute of Chicago. "It was during that visit that I determined to become an artist. That day I secured a pamphlet that showed me that art could be studied. That had never occurred to me" (as quoted in Vicki Heltunen, Color, Pattern  Plane: E. Martin Hennings in Taos, Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas, 1986).  Hennings held fast to his purpose and graduated with multiple prizes and honors from the School of the Art Institute in 1904, remaining for an additional two years for continued instruction with John H. Vanderpoel. The Chicago curriculum, modeled after traditional European academic practice, emphasized drawing.  Hennings began his art career as a muralist and commercial artist. Respectably successful, but deeply unsatisfied, in 1912 he competed for a Prix de Rome. When he came in a disappointing second, he determined to make his own way to Europe for further study.  

Hennings chose the Munich Royal Academy as his destination, a reflection both of his own German background and the strong German-American influence in Chicago. At the Munich Academy he studied with Franz Von Stuck, a prominent symbolist and art nouveau painter; Angelo Jank, a renowned painter of horses; and Walter Thor, a portraitist. Munich offered a firm grounding in academic technique in an atmosphere animated by the swirling influences of German Art Nouveau, the movement called Jugendstil (literally, youth style)). Hennings joined the American Artists Club in Munich where he met Walter Ufer and Victor Higgins, two Midwest artists with ties to Chicago, who became lifelong friends. World War I cut short Hennings' art studies. Returning to Chicago, Hennings renewed his friendship with Ufer and Higgins, who, already established, introduced him to their patron, the Mayor of Chicago, Carter Henry Harrison, Jr.

Harrison was the first Chicago-born native to be mayor of that city, serving five terms as had his father before him. Heir to a real estate fortune, he had been educated in Germany. In the 1880's he traveled with his brother, Preston, to New Mexico, and developed a lifelong love of the region. Carter Harrison was an avid outdoorsman, a hunter and fisherman, but also a serious amateur photographer who exhibited his own photos of Pueblo Indians. A political reformer, he was also a man of letters who belonged to the Cliff Dwellers Club, a distinguished association where artists, writers and businessmen mingled. His patronage of art and artists was both public and private. In 1914 he succeeded in establishing the Chicago Commission for the Encouragement of Local Artists, with an allocation of $5,000 per year to purchase works from artists who had been in Chicago for at least two years and place them in schools and municipal buildings. In the first round of commission grants in 1914-15 Walter Ufer was among the chosen artists. In 1916 the commission bought works from Victor Higgins and Hennings. As a wealthy private citizen Harrison organized a syndicate of businessmen, including his good friend, Oscar Mayer, the Wisconsin meatpacking magnate, whose purpose was to subsidize young artists by guaranteeing in advance to buy the works they produced. Reflecting his own enthusiasm for Taos, Harrison paid for Walter Ufer and Victor Higgins to go there in 1914 and 1915 respectively, followed by Martin Hennings in 1917. All three artists subsequently became active members of the Taos Art Society, while continuing to maintain their Chicago connections. Summer and Fall, they painted in Taos and then traveled Chicago-bound on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, where they exhibited their work and found a warm critical reception and an audience of appreciative patrons. Hennings spent the rest of his life living and working in Taos, punctuated by frequent trips back to Chicago.  

In Along the Canyon Road Hennings visits one of his favorite themes in a composition that utilized the fruits of all his academic training. The artist explained the attraction of this scene:

Nothing thrills me more, when in the fall, the aspens and cottonwoods are in color and with the sunlight playing across them – all the poetry and drama, all the moods and changes of nature are there to inspire one to greater accomplishment from year to year (as quoted in Judith A. Barter, Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier, 1890-1940, 2003, p. 68).

A vertical screen created by the white trunks of the aspen trees serves as scaffolding for a tapestry of smaller undulating branches whose curves recall the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau. Hennings applies his instruction in figure painting and horse painting in the careful delineation of the riders on the trail. On this canvas only the rider facing to the right is clearly visible, as the two riders he meets coming toward him approach from the shadows cast across the road by a group of aspens. The dazzling sunshine that bathes the foreground rider and illuminates the electric yellow of the aspen leaves on high is Hennings' acknowledgement of the distance he traveled from Munich to New Mexico.