Donald Beauregard paints the Southwest with an expert’s touch

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Utah Landscape, Donald Beauregard, 1914, oil on canvas, 3138 inches, collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, gift of the Honorable Frank Springer, 1925. (Courtesy of Blair Clark/The New Mexico Museum of Art)

Years before Los Cinco Pintores elevated Santa Fe into an art colony, a painter from Utah painted the Southwest under a veil of European modernism.

Donald Beauregard designed the murals inside the New Mexico Museum of Art, studied in Paris and picked up the experimental styles of Czanne and Gauguin.

He was one of the first artists recruited by New Mexico Museum of Art director Edgar Lee Hewett. The museum owns about 180 of his paintings.

But no one knows him.

Opening on Feb. 25, an exhibition of 40 works examines Beauregard’s short but ambitious career in “An American in Paris: Donald Beauregard.”

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Current Museum of Art director and exhibit curator Mark White began researching the artist when he joined the institution in 2020. His introduction to the artist came when he saw Beauregard’s murals inside the St. Francis Auditorium.

“He was actually a Mormon kid from a small town in Utah,” White said. Hewett persuaded lawyer and Santa Fe booster Frank Springer to become Beauregard’s patron by sending him to Paris to study at the prestigious Acadmie Julian for two years. The artist traveled to Spain, and Brittany, France, where he studied the seaside commune of Douarnenez.

In the late 19th century, many modern artists, including Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Srusier, left the urban environs of Paris seeking inspiration in the rural Catholic communities of the south, particularly in Douarnenez .

Instruction focuses on drawing live models, studying plaster casts of antique sculpture, and imitating masters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Despite this historical foundation, Beauregard felt the drawing of Impressionism, with its fluid brushwork and attention to the transient effects of shadow and light.

Apostasy at Santa Clara, 1917, oil on canvas, from the mural at St. Francis Auditorium, designed by Donald Beauregard, painted by Donald Beauregard and Kenneth Chapman, collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, gift of the Honorable Frank Springer, 1917 (Courtesy of Blair Clark/The New Mexico Museum of Art)

Auvergne, Donald Beauregard, circa 1912, oil on canvas, 19×23 inches, collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, gift of the Honorable Frank Springer, 1925. (Courtesy of Blair Clark/The New Mexico Museum of Art)

(Courtesy of Blair Clark/The New Mexico Museum of Art)

Portrait of the Artist, Donald Beauregard, circa 1910, oil on canvas, collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, gift of the Honorable Frank Springer, 1925. (Courtesy of Blair Clark/The New Mexico Museum of Art)

His unique style blended the innovations of Paul Czanne, Gauguin and van Gogh, as well as the early works of Henri Matisse and German Expressionism.

“He was always in the latest element of modernism,” says White. “In 1912, for an American artist, he was in the vanguard. Few were doing such exceptional work.”

“Portrait of an Artist,” (1912), reflects Czanne’s painterly strokes and subtle colors, as well as the Impressionists. The subject wears clothing typical of Parisian art students.

“That’s definitely my favorite,” White said. “We don’t know who it is. He seems like a fellow student. Here he took the part of the stroller (a flnuer) in the streets of Paris.

The flnuer observed everything in experience with intellectual curiosity, as an artist might, and was often recognized in the streets of Paris.

The painting was probably made in Douarnenez, White said.

“It was a tour-de-force of everything he took in Paris. If Beauregard had a masterpiece, this might be it.”

The artist adopted many of the characteristics of Impressionism by cropping the composition to exclude parts of the scene, as a photograph might do, and by leaving large amounts of empty, negative space in front.

In “Utah Landscape,” (1914), Beauregard offers a light-flecked, Impressionist vision of the Southwest. The painter probably painted the scene in the southern part of the state before his second trip to Europe in 1911. The spare light of the allowed him to use swaths of blue in the shadows of the middle ground, a technique often used by French Impressionists.

In “Auvergne,” (c. 1912), he meets van Gogh, who splashes the countryside with broad brushstrokes behind two peasant women. He uses a deliberately naïve style to express his engagement with the rustic landscape.

“These are the women of Douarnenez,” White said. “Brittany remains kind of rural, staunchly Catholic. The women were recognized by those hats.”

The lace chapeau known as the coiffe varies from village to village, so that locals can identify the origin of the wearer.

Rue Royale, Paris, Donald Beauregard, circa 1910, oil on canvas, 23×18 inches, collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, gift of the Honorable Frank Springer, 1925. (Courtesy of Blair Clark/The New Mexico Museum of Art)

Beauregard’s street scene “Rue Royale, Paris” (c. 1910), was painted near the Acadmie Julian.

The artist returned to the US to complete a mural for the New Mexico building at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. The mural cycle explores the history of St. Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan Order, culminating in an allegorical celebration of the arts and culture of Santa Fe.

Beauregard never finished it. He died of stomach cancer at the age of 29 in 1914.

Art historian and Native arts champion Kenneth Chapman and painter Carlos Vierra finished the mural for installation in St. Francis Auditorium of the museum.

“This is the type of artist that Hewett thought was the epitome of the Santa Fe art colony,” White said. “Many of the best known (such as Will Shuster, Fremont Ellis, Walter Mruk, Jozef Bakos and Willard Nash, known as Los Cinco Pintores,) have yet to come. He was professionally trained in Europe, he was experimental. (Hewett) Beauregard really believes in where the city should go.

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