Audley Dean Nicols

Audley Dean Nicols (22 September 1875–13 November 1941) was an American artist, illustrator and muralist. Born and raised in Sewickley, Pennsylvania; he studied in New York and Europe, and worked as an illustrator for various national magazines in the United States. He moved to El Paso, Texas in the early 1920s, where he painted desert landscapes of the American Southwest. Nicols achieved national recognition during his lifetime; his style and choice of subjects gathering followers who became known as the "Purple Mountain Painters".

Born in 1875 in Sewickley 12 miles (19 km) from Pittsburgh along the Ohio River, Audley Dean Nicols was the son of Parshall D. Nicols, an iron broker, and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Agnes McLaughlin, an art teacher. He had a sister, Alice Clyde Nicols, and two brothers, Verner, who died of the Spanish Flu, and Lowell, who was an art critic and an optical glass research chemist. His mother Lizzie, who had studied with painter George Hetzel and taught drawing and painting at the Steubenville Seminary, gave him his first art lessons.

After graduating from Sewickley High School in 1893, he went to New York to study under Harry Siddons Mowbray, Edwin Blashfield, and Kenyon Cox, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Students League of New York. After further studies in Europe, Nicols started a career as a magazine illustrator, working for several publications including Collier's, McClure's, Cosmopolitan, Harper's, Scribner's, St. Nicholas Magazine, and The Burr McIntosh Monthly. After a period of convalescence at home due to surgical operations, he moved into oil painting, working from a studio in the Sewickley Valley Trust building. Some of his work from this earlier period includes murals in Pittsburgh public buildings and portraits. He painted Civil War General Alexander Hays in a portrait and in a now lost painting where he is shown dragging the Confederate flag from his horse. His work in oils began to get some recognition and in 1904, Nicols' painting A Reverie was accepted for the ninth Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh.

Nicols began visiting the Arizona desert and Texas from around 1912, permanently moving with his family to El Paso in 1922, due in part to health problems with an extrapulmonary tuberculosis contracted in his youth, and that made him walk with a limp. He lived in a rock house in Fort Boulevard at the foothills of the Franklin mountains, and since before his permanent move he went on long desert expeditions for plein air painting, first in the company of two Franciscan priests and later with a friend. His first work with of a desert subject was bought by breakfast cereal pioneer Charles W. Post in a Chicago gallery, sometime between 1912 and 1914.

Nicols continued to paint desert panoramas of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, and large canvas on Old West subjects. His 1927 depiction of Tokay, a former coal-mining settlement in Socorro County, New Mexico, is considered a valuable historical record of what is now a ghost town. Also in 1927, a lithograph reproduction of Nicols' painting of Texas' El Capitan peak was distributed in a publicity campaign for the Texas and Pacific Railway. The original painting of the mountain was later placed in Abilene's Research Center for the Southwest, at the Hardin-Simmons University library. In 1929, he was commissioned by architect Henry Trost to design the glass-stained mural which incorporates the 6-by-7-foot (1.8 by 2.1 m) painting Cave creek canyon – Chiricahua mountains, located at the top of the lobby stairs of the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona.

In his later life Nicols was characterized as eccentric and mysterious, absorbed by his work, but he had a circle of close friends including other artists and General Robert L. Howze. He was married to Mary Olivia Nicols née Mahoney, an Irish immigrant, and had two children, Audley Dean Jr and Mary Beth. In 1932, he was hospitalized for several weeks due to a brain hemorrhage but eventually recovered. He died almost ten years later in November 1941, just a few months after celebrating his daughter's 10th birthday. The artist was buried in Restlawn Memorial Park in El Paso, with writer and muralist Tom Lea, who was also Mary Beth's godfather, acting as one of the pallbearers.

Audley Dean Nicols' style of clean, detailed landscape painting was inspired by the clarity, sharp lines and strong contrasts of the desert, and he applied techniques to capture the colors and hint at the vast expanses. Nicols said in 1916:

The desert is everything but gray. There are clean fresh blues, pinks and yellows in the skies, opalescent purple, rose and lavender in the ever-present distant mountains, dull greens of every shade in the vegetation, reds and yellows in the rocks and earth -but never gray.