Apache by Herbert Herget
About the Work
In the November 1, 1925 issue of Sunday Magazine of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Herbert Herget stated that a St. Louisan such as himself should be especially interested in painting indigenous American life as it "was from this city, through its fur trading interests and its missionaries that the earliest civilizations reached the Indians of the West. If Lewis and Clark had not gone on that expedition which penetrated to the Pacific Coast over a hundred years ago there would have been no Oregon Trail....The Santa Fe Trail 100 years ago was laid out by men from St. Louis and St. Charles by means of a congressional appropriation provided through a Missouri Senator, Thomas Hart Benton....The great scouts and hunters, men like Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, have left their names inseparably connected with Missouri. Why then would not a Missouri painter be interested in leaving a pictured record of the West and its vanishing race?" This study of an Apache Indian is one of ten works on paper in the Sid Richardson Museum collection.About Herbert Herget
Born in St. Louis in 1885, Herbert M. Herget enjoyed drawing as a young boy, finding inspiration from the reproductions of Frederic Remington’s paintings published in American magazines of the day. He attended public schools in St. Louis after which he took a course in sculpture. After six months of sculpture he decided to pursue painting. Herget received his first serious training as a painter at the Washington University School of Fine Art. Later, he spent several years serving as an apprentice and illustrator for the publishers Woodard & Tiernan.
Interested in the American Indian, Herget began to travel extensively throughout the American West, amassing a collection of Native art and craftwork. By the 1930s and through the 1940s, the artist was producing detailed, ethnologically sophisticated illustrations of life in the Ancient and New World civilizations for the National Geographic Society. Between 1935 and 1950, Herget’s series on the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas appears in National Geographic Magazine.
Artists were integral to the publication as illustrators like Herget collaborated with scientists to interpret and transform the researched information, revealing the marvels of nature and grandeur of civilizations that prospered long ago. Over the course of fifteen years, Herget produced 158 paintings for National Geographic. He often worked in watercolor. The precise medium allowed Herget to capture minute detail and clarity of line.
Little is known about the artist apart from his work. Herbert Herget died in 1950.