Feast Day: San Juan Pueblo

William Penhallow Henderson, born Medford, MA 1877-died Tesuque, NM 1943 · ca. 1921

William Penhallow “Whippy” Henderson created a rhythmic procession of shapes leading upward and outward from the crowd of villagers at the lower left to the slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The villagers, their houses, the trees and the hills are all part of a unified world summoned by the feast day drummer, whose music seems to radiate through the landscape. Henderson documented an important religious procession in the southwestern pueblo of San Juan, about twenty-five miles north of his home in Santa Fe. He showed the town’s two churches, the small Loretto Chapel and the larger Church of San Juan. Because sketching or photographing such events was forbidden, Henderson would observe them, often from horseback, and then return to his studio and paint from memory.