Walter Ufer was a leading figure among the colony of artists who painted Native American and other Western subjects in Taos, New Mexico, during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.
He worked for lithographic firms in Louisville and, after 1893, in Hamburg and Dresden, Germany. After studying at the Royal Academy of the Fine Arts in Dresden, he returned in 1898 to Louisville, where he worked for a newspaper for two years. He next worked as a graphic artist while attending the J. Francis Smith School in Chicago and later teaching there. In 1911 he traveled in Europe and North Africa and then studied with Walter Thor (1870-1929) at the Royal Academy of the Fine Arts in Munich until 1913. Returning to the United States, Ufer first settled in Chicago, where he came to the attention of Mayor Carter Harrison. Harrison subsidized a trip, Ufer’s first, to the American Southwest in 1914. Fascinated with the brilliant sunlight, Ufer became a plein-air painter and settled in Taos, New Mexico, but for several years he made annual trips to Chicago and New York. By 1920 he had achieved recognition and success with his bright, sunlit scenes of the life of Native Americans; he was one of the first to present them in a more honest, less idealized depiction.

Among other honors, Ufer was the first Taos artist to be awarded a prize at the Carnegie International; he was awarded the Temple Gold Medal of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1923. Ufer was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1920 and an academician in 1926. A solo exhibition of his work was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1922.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Denver, Rosenstock Arts, Walter Ufer Papers § "The Santa Fe-Taos Art Colony: Walter Ufer," El Palacio 3 (August 1916): 74-81 § Rose V. S. Berry, "Walter Ufer in a One-Man Show," American Magazine of Art 13 (December 1922): 507-14 § Stephen L. Good, "Walter Ufer: Munich to Taos, 1913-1918," in Laura M. Bickerstaff, Pioneer Artists of Taos (1955; rev. ed., Denver: Old West, 1983), pp. 113-73 § Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American Art, and others, Art in New Mexico, 1900-1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe, exh. cat., 1986, published by Abbeville Press, New York, with essays by Charles C. Eldredge, William H. Truettner, and Julie Schimmel, biography by Sharyn R. Udall and Andrew Connors, bibliography.