Sketch for "Navajo's Romance"
Gerald Cassidy
[BANC PIC 1967.028--PIC carton 4]

GERALD CASSIDY PAPERS
Sketch for "Navajo’s Romance," bought by the French government in 1926 for the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris.

This preliminary sketch, dated 1926, is one of several examples found in the Cassidy Papers.

Few artists of the Taos and Sante Fe School of painting were more popular or respected than Cassidy, and his works are found in museums and private collections around the globe.

Gerald Cassidy was raised in Cincinnati and studied there at the Art Institute under Frank Duveneck, who had also taught Joseph Sharp and Walter Ufer. In 1898, after a period in New York where he worked as a commercial artist, Cassidy contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium in Albuquerque. His health improved and, finding that he loved the New Mexico landscape and its people, he began to paint the local Indians.

In 1912 Cassidy married the sculptor, Ina Sizer, and he soon abandoned commercial illustration and concentrated on painting. Cassidy's reputation as a painter was established in 1915 when he received the grand prize and gold medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Diego for a series of murals for the Indian Arts Building, which depicted the life of the Southwestern Indians.