Navajo Land Arizona New Mexico 1950s Vintage Santa Fe Railway Travel Poster Art
by Peter Ogden
Title
Navajo Land Arizona New Mexico 1950s Vintage Santa Fe Railway Travel Poster Art
Artist
Peter Ogden
Medium
Painting - Chromolithograph
Description
This is a restored copy of a circa 1950 vintage chromolithograph tourism and promotional southwestern American railroad advertising poster sponsored by the Santa Fe Railway for rail travel to the Navajo tribal homelands in Arizona, New Mexico, Monument Valley and in the Great Basin Desert region on the Colorado Plateau in the southwestern United States.
This artwork was created by Willard Frederick Elms, 1900-1956. Elms was a former art professor at the Chicago Art Institute and had his own studio in Chicago. His main client was the Sears Roebuck Catalog. Elms relocated to Tucson, Arizona in 1949. Elms was well known for his fashion illustrations and his paintings of Native Americans in southwestern landscapes.
In this painting Elms depicts a southwestern scene reminiscent of Monument Valley with a tall golden sandstone butte towering in the background under a bright desert sky. To the left we see a Navajo shepherd riding a donkey or burro as he tends a small flock of sheep. In the right foreground a Navajo woman approaches the shadows of a weather beaten juniper type tree as she searches for something, possibly kindling, to be placed in the old horse drawn wooden cart that rests behind her.
Monument Valley is a region of the Colorado Plateau characterized by a cluster of sandstone buttes, the largest reaching 1,000 ft above the valley floor. It is located on the Utah-Arizona state line, near the Four Corners area.
The Navajo (/ˈnævəhoʊ, ˈnɑːvə-/; British English: Navaho; Navajo: Diné or Naabeehó) are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States.
With more than 399,494 enrolled tribal members as of 2021, the Navajo Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United States; additionally, the Navajo Nation has the largest reservation in the country. The reservation straddles the Four Corners region and covers more than 27,325 square miles (70,000 square km) of land in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. The Navajo Reservation is slightly larger than the state of West Virginia. The Navajo language is spoken throughout the region, and most Navajos also speak English.
The states with the largest Navajo populations are Arizona (140,263) and New Mexico (108,306). More than three-fourths of the enrolled Navajo population resides in these two states.
The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, often referred to as the Santa Fe or AT&SF, was one of the larger railroads in the United States. The railroad was chartered in February 1859 to serve the cities of Atchison and Topeka, Kansas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The railroad reached the Kansas–Colorado border in 1873 and Pueblo, Colorado, in 1876. To create a demand for its services, the railroad set up real estate offices and sold farmland from the land grants that it was awarded by Congress.
The Fine Art America logo does not appear on the final product.
Uploaded
December 24th, 2022
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