William Victor HIGGINS (born June 28, 1884, Shelbyville, Indiana–died August 23, 1949, Taos, New Mexico)
From a young age Higgins loved forms and colors, especially in flowers, and tended his garden as a painter might work a canvas. At fifteen, Victor left his native Indiana for Chicago, where he studied at the Art Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts. Higgins was then sponsored and spent two and a half years studying and traveling in Europe, where he met Walter Ufer and Martin Hennings. He returned in 1914 and was sent on a painting trip to New Mexico. It was here that Higgins found the strong light, brilliant color and lure of the land a powerful antidote to the confines of academic training. He joined the Taos Society of Artists in 1917, and as a link between his more conservative colleagues and the emerging artistic developments of the twentieth century, Higgins wedded theory to his own intuitively derived visual harmonies. The result was a rich and varied body of work in still life, figure painting and most significantly, landscape.