Meadowlark Gallery: The Artist Biographies

Warren Eliphalet Rollins
(1861-1962)
Warren Eliphalet Rollins was born in Carson City, Nevada in 1861 and died in Winslow, Arizona in 1962. He was an early member of the Santa Fe artists colony, a painter of Indians, and teacher. His work and murals are in the Museum of New Mexico, the Oakland Art Museum, and the Santa Fe Railroad. Rollins was raised in California. He was the pupil of Virgil Williams at the San Francisco School of Design, becoming the assistant director of the school. In 1887 after further study in the East, he moved to San Diego. He began to specialize in Indian subjects, traveling through the Western states. In 1900, he was in Arizona painting Hopi Indians and he also worked at the Chaco Canyon ruins in northern New Mexico. Rollins had a studio near El Tovar at the Grand Canyon. Along with Carlos Vierra, Gerald Cassidy, Kenneth Chapman, and Sheldon Parsons, he became an early member of the Santa Fe art colony through his friendship with E. I. Couse in 1915. He had one of the first formal exhibitions in Santa Fe, showing Indian paintings before 1910 so that he became regarded as the "dean of the Santa Fe art colony." Rollins had a period in his career when he favored working in crayon, an oddity matched by other Western painters like Groll and Kihn. In the 1940's, he moved to Baltimore where he drew crayon landscapes.
View high resolution images of works by W. E. Rollins when available.