A hidden heritage

A HIDDEN HERITAGE
THE BROADMOOR ART ACADEMY

Rooted in the treasured landmarks of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts
Center and Colorado College, a legacy exists.
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center
Colorado College
Beginning nearly a century ago, these
two institutions formed a synergistic
bond in the creation of the Broadmoor
Art Academy.
This professional school was a civic fixture for the
city, and also became the Art Department of
Colorado College. In 2019, these two institutions will
be celebrating of the 100th anniversary of the
Broadmoor Art Academy.
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THE HISTORY OF ART, EDUCATION, AND CULTURE
SETS COLORADO SPRINGS APART
At its origin in 1871, General William J.
Palmer conceived a city that was inspired
by the magnificent mountain on its west
and the grand prairie on its east.
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As a city, Colorado Springs is unique in the state. Unlike any of
its neighbors, its history of art, education, and culture
stretches back to well before Colorado’s official statehood.

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
KATHERINE LEE BATES
“O Beautiful for spacious skies,
for amber waves of grain,
For purple mountains majesty above the fruited
plain!
America, America - God shed His grace on thee;
And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to
shining sea.”
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OUR OWN AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
We, the residents of Colorado Springs, find ourselves steeped in the setting that inspired the poem, “America the
Beautiful.” Within the original plat the General included a site for Colorado College, broad tree lined streets,
numerous and extensive parks and a trail that circled the downtown center. He called it “the Emerald Mile”. We call
it the Legacy Loop.
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GARDEN OF THE GODS
PIKES PEAK

COLORADO’S FIRST ART COLONY
Hamilton Hamilton Thomas C.
Parrish
Walter ParisWalter Parrish
Eliza Mills
Greatorex
Several notable artists joined a visiting artist,
Eliza Pratt Greatorex, when she was
commissioned to complete a book entitled,
“Summer Etchings in Colorado”. What began
as a place to spend the warm months
enjoying the incredible landscape, our city
turned into Colorado’s first art colony,
including famous Eastern painters such as
Hamilton Hamilton, Walter Parrish, Thomas
Parrish and Walter Paris
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NEWPORT OF THE ROCKIES
The fortuitous discovery of gold in Cripple Creek in the 1890’s -combined with the entrepreneurial spirit of the men
in the mining business - led to the growth of the economy of Colorado Springs. The society that evolved continued
to maintain a reputation as a cultural mecca in Colorado. References such as the “Athens of Colorado”, “Little
London” and “Newport of the Rockies” contributed to the growth of Colorado College and the BAA. From its
inception the BAA served as the Art Department of Colorado College. Among the successful enterprising citizens
were Spencer Penrose and Charles Tutt.
CHARLES TUTT
SPENCER PENROSE
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THE BIRTH OF BROADMOOR HOTEL
With their mining fortunes, Penrose and Tutt
invested in the development of Broadmoor
Hotel that opened in 1918 as a world-class
resort. It attracted sophisticated patrons of
the arts to Colorado Springs enhancing the
support of the cultural facilities in the
community.CHARLES TUTT
SPENCER PENROSE
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JULIE PENROSE
Spencer’s wife, Julie, owned her
home at 30 West Dale – the site of
the present-day Fine Arts Center.
When they moved closer to the
Broadmoor, Julie decided to turn
her house into a place for the
community’s arts programs. The
Broadmoor Art Academy was
founded on October 5, 1919. In
addition to the house, Julie and
Spencer provided a $250,000 fund
for the operation of the BAA. Julie’s
original vision was to provide a
place to house the various arts
organizations and to attract the
finest artists in America to teach,
exhibit, lecture to the community.
She realized that most importantly
it would be a place for artists to
commune with each other.
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THE BIRTH OF THE BROADMOOR ARTS ACADEMY
Other museums
established in the early
20th century include:
Atlanta High Museum,
Detroit Art Museum,
Cleveland Museum,
Whitney Museum, Saint
Louis Art Museum and the
Nelson Atkins Museum
Kan.
Cleveland Museum of
Art
Broadmoor Academy of Art
Denver Art Museum
Detroit Art Museum
The BAA was founded in 1919, along with several other
well known Art Museums established in the early
decades of the 20th century. The Denver Art Museum
was established in 1923 as the Chappell House, four
years after the BAA.
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THE EVOLUTION OF THE BAA INTO THE CSFAC WAS
A PRODUCT OF THE GENIUS OF THREE WOMEN.
Alice Bemis
Taylor
Elizabeth Sage Hare
Julie Penrose
It began during the Great Depression with the BAA at its core.
Alice Bemis Taylor had spent much time in the southwest and
amassed a major collection of art and artifacts from both Native
American Pueblos and Hispanic cultures. Her original plan was to
build a building on the Colorado College campus to house her
collection. Then she and Julie Penrose decided that
the site at 30 West Dale would be
perfect. Elizabeth Sage Hare, who started
Fountain Valley School in 1912 and had a
passion for theater and dance, joined in
their effort. Thus was born the vision to
build a modern facility in which all the
arts could thrive.
Fountain Valley
School Return to Contents

THE EXPANSION OF A BAA VISION
Fine Arts Center
John Gaw
Meem
Fine Arts Center
30 West Dale Street
The concept expanded with the planning for a
new building. It was designed by John Gaw
Meem, a Santa Fe architect credited with the
invention Southwest Territorial Architecture. He
asserted that the architecture rooted in the
southwest was the true form of American
architecture rather than the East Coast
Colonialism. With two major additions over one
hundred years this building was and remains
today a beautiful blend of southwest and
modernist styles.
On January 4, 1935, Trustees of the BAA
authorized an amendment to their charter,
changing the name to Colorado Springs Fine Arts
Center. The Bylaws remained the same and the
original Trustees remained in place including:
Charles Tutt Jr., Anne Ritter, John McClymont
and Francis Drexel Smith with several additions.
The new building opened on April 20, 1936 with a
grand celebration.
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FOUNDING ARTISTS OF BAA
John Carlson Robert Reid
The artists of the Broadmoor Art Academy were
among the most important artist working in the
United States in the first third of the twentieth
century. Their work attracted the attention of
Americas most prominent collectors and
museums. Today they are represented in the
permanent collections of every major art museum,
that includes historic American art as well many
international museums. Major public murals
throughout the United States were created by
many of those same artists. They, when viewed as
a body, have influenced the art culture and in turn
the culture of the the United States.Robert Reid and John Carlson, both members of the
National Academy of Art were the first two artists
brought to the Academy in 1920.
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GREAT INFLUENCES OF THE BAA
John Carlson
Robert Reid
Ernest Lawson
Birger Sandzen
Randall Davey
William Potter
Eric Bransby
Otis Dozier
George Biddle
Archie Musick
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Content
Return to Great Influences
• The Beginning
• What sets Colorado Springs apart
• America the Beautiful
• Our own America the Beautiful
• Colorado’s first art colony
• Elizabeth Pratt Greatorex
• Newport of the Rokies
• The birth of The Broadmoor
• Julie Penrose
• The birth of BAA
• 3 Women of Genius
• The Expansion of BAA
• Founding artists of BAA
• Greatest influences of the BAA

FRANCIS DREXEL SMITH
Born to a wealthy Chicago family
in 1874, Francis Drexel Smith came
to Colorado Springs in 1900. Like
so many other well-to-do
imigrants from the East and
Midwest, he came for his health,
recovered and stayed for a
lifetime. During five decades as a
professional artist in Colorado
Springs, Smith completed
hundreds of canvases and was a
key supporter and contributor to
the nascent Colorado Springs arts
community.
Return to BAA Vision

Robert Reid
Robert Reid was born in Stockbridge,
Massachussets and attended the Schoolof the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston under Otto Grundmann,
where he was also later an instructor. In 1884 he moved
to New YorkCity, studying at the Art Students League,
and in 1885 he went to Paris to study at the Academie
Julia under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph
Lefebvre. His early pictures were figures of French
peasants, painted at Etaples.
Robert Reid's murals for the Palace of Fine Arts building
at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San
Francisco, 1915) were an extraordinary tribute to the
Arts. Eight huge panels graced the ceiling of the
rotunda: The Four Golds of California (Golden Metal,
Wheat, Citrus Fruits, and Poppies); plus Ideals in
Art, Inspirations of All Arts, the Birth of European
Art and Birth of Oriental Art. These paintings no longer
exist in San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, which was
re-built in the 1960s, and their current whereabouts areReturn to Great Influences

Otis Dozier
Otis Marion Dozier is noted as a member of a group of Texas
regionalist artists known as the "Dallas Nine". His style was
characterized by brilliant colors and strong forms, often focusing
on the plight of farmers affected by the Great Depression.
Dozier attended the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 1938 on
a scholarship, studying with Boardman Robinson. For the next
seven years he served as Boardmans assistant. While in Colorado,
the Rocky Mountains became a favorite painting ground where he
completed more than 3000 sketches of ghost towns and
mountains. Influenced by Robinson, he developed a more fluid
style and became an expert in the lithographic medium. Upon
returning to Dallas, Dozier taught life drawing at Southern
Methodist University from 1945 to 1948. From 1948 until 1970 he
taught drawing and painting at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
He participated in sole exhibitions in the early to mid 1940s, as
well as other major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of
American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
City. Return to Great Influences

John Carlson
While he proclaimed that art could not be taught, but only learned
through practice, John F. Carlson, nonetheless, was one of the most
important teachers of landscape painting in the early decades of
the twentieth century. He was born in a tiny town on the eastern
coast of Sweden and immigrated to the United States with his
family in 1884. In 1902, he found his way to the Art Students League
in New York, where he studied painting with Frank V. DuMond and
Birge Harrison. The following year, Harrison joined the teaching
staff at Byrdcliffe, a newly-founded arts and crafts community in
Woodstock, New York, and Carlson followed.
The hills, pastures and woods of Woodstock provided ideal subject
matter for them both, and at Carlson’s urging the Art Students
League established a summer school in Woodstock, where he
taught from 1906 to 1918. In 1920, Carlson co-founded the
Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado; two years later he returned to
Woodstock to establish his own school, the John F. Carlson School
of Landscape Painting.
Carlson’s teaching philosophy was simple: “Study directly from
nature,” he wrote. “Study to feel, and know something of her visible
functionings. Nature, to the thoughtful, will ever remain a vast and
delightful storehouse, and the love that we bestow upon her is notReturn to Great Influences

Randall Davey
Randall Vernon Davey was born into an upper-middle-class family
in East Orange, New Jersey. In 1904 he enrolled in the School of
Architecture at Cornell University, and after graduating he moved to
New York to pursue a career in art. He soon became a student of
Robert Henri and began work in portraiture, which he would
continue throughout his life.
Acting on a suggestion of Henri's, Davey moved west to Santa Fe
and by 1919 was permanently settled there, turning his attention to
landscape. Although beautiful Western landscapes and horse racing
became his passions, Davey continued painting portraits and taught
fine art as well.
Randall Davey is considered an important member of the Santa Fe
Art Colony and an influence on the Cinco Pintores. However, he
tended to keep to himself with his family in his home on Upper
Canyon Road, maintaining contacts with clubs and societies, like the
Lotos and Century Association, in the East. There is little doubt,
though, as to his love for the West: "I wouldn't trade my life here
where I can hunt, shoot, ride, for all the committee-going and boot-
licking you've got to do in a city for anything. An artist might starve
for food here, but he'll starve spiritually in a place like New York."

Randall Davey
Randall Davey was born in East Orange, New Jersey in 1887. From an inauspicious
childhood he would go on to become a highly-influential early 20th century painter of still
lifes, horse-racing and polo scenes, nudes and landscapes. Davey attended Cornell
University to study architecture in 1905 where he received a notion of aesthetic principles
and form that would prove valuable later in life. Against the wishes of his father, Davey left
Cornell in 1908 and moved to New York in order to pursue a career in art. Davey entered
the New York School of Art, where he was fortuitous enough to take instruction from
Robert Henri, an art academic who taught many of the Ashcan School and Taos Society
artists, as well as being himself a member of both communities. He became Henri's
assistant instructor and, in 1913, took part in the Armory Show, which forever changed the
face of American art. His career accelerated after the Armory show and, in 1915, he won
the National Academy of Design's Hallgarten Prize.Deeply opposed to American entry in the First World War, Davey spent 1917 in
Cuba, avoiding the draft. Once he returned, Davey and his wife fell in love with
Santa Fe, NM. From there, h took a number of prestigious teaching positions over
the years, including at the Broadmoor Art Academy and the Chicago Institute of
Art. Though he chose to be an artist, Davey's tastes ran rich. He was an avid polo
player, and his teaching salary was as high as twice that of other teachers because
of the necessity of boarding and maintaining a string of polo ponies. He was an
early driver of automobiles, as well; he and Sloan had reached Santa Fe by
automobile, long before they became a commonplace sight. Ironically and
tragically, he died in a car accident in 1964 on his way to California. He was 77Return to Great Influences

Ernest Lawson
Canadian-born Ernest Lawson became one of the most important second-generation
Impressionist painters in American in the first part of the twentieth century. He trained at the
Kansas City Art Institute and New York in 1890, enrolling in the Art Students League. In 1893
Lawson traveled to France to polish his artistic skills. No matter the master artists Lawson
worked with, he sought to develop and retain his own style, saying that “French influence kills if
taken in too large a dose.”By 1894 when he exhibited two paintings at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris.
William Merritt Chase dubbed him “America’s greatest landscape painter.”
Returning to the United States in 1897, he later accepted a position to teach for
three summers at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs beginning in
1927. Lawson may well have been encouraged to come to Colorado Springs by two
New York artist-colleagues: Robert Reid (1920-1927) and Randall Davey (1925 to
1930) Although not pleased by his rather low salary in comparison to Davey’s, he
became part of the Academy’s distinguished faculty in the 1920s.
Lawson found in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs a wonderland of red
sandstone rock formations, providing him and his students with abundant material
for onsite painting. From a vantage point high above the city he captured the
expanse of the plains stretching eastward, as in Rocks and Plains, View from a
Mountain Top and Gateway to the Plains. Other subjects in the vicinity of Colorado
Springs were Pikes Peak, Cheyenne Mountain and Glen Eyrie just north of the
Garden of the Gods and the location of an English Tudor-style castle built in 1903 by
General William Jackson Palmer.
After the Broadmoor Art Academy, he returned to New. In the Herald Tribune art
critic Royal Cortissoz summed up the artist’s respective approaches to his subject
matter, giving his Colorado work equal billing – not always the case during hisReturn to Great Influences

Birger Sandzen
Birgeer Sandzen was born in Sweden in 1871. He was known
to paint in a subtle, tonalist style early in his career, in his
home country of Sweden, and then he studied in Paris where
he was introduced to Impressionism, pointillism, and Post-
Impressionism. That changed his outlook and his painting
style forever. He immigrated to Kansas to teach at Bethany
College and began a lifelong love affair with the landscape of
America, particularly the American West. The artist visited
Colorado almost every summer from 1908 until 1952.
Sandzén succeeded John Carlson as professor of landscape
painting at the Broadmoor Art Academy during the summers
of 1923 and 1924. Sandzén referred to Colorado’s scenery as
“a paradise for painters” and adapted his open brushwork
and vibrant hues to create epic paintings of landscapes
throughout the state, with emphasis on the Pikes Peak
Region and Estes Park. “Colorado Springs ought to be one of
the most important art centers of the west,” Sandzén told the
Colorado Springs Gazette in 1923. “It is centrally located, in a
setting that is without rival in the entire west. It has a
sketching ground to offer artists that cannot be surpassed in
the United States or elsewhere.” Sandzen died in 1954.Return to Great Influences

William Potter
William J. Potter, a painter known for his
landscapes, marine scenes and figures, was
born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania on 14 July
1883. He began studying sculpture at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
However, after he moved to London, he
took up drawing and became a pupil of W.
Sickert. After Potter’s return to the United
States, he eventually settled in Colorado
Springs, Colorado where he soon joined the
faculty of the Broadmoor Academy of Art. In
the 1930s, his subject matter became
focused on scenes of old European towns.
Around this time, Potter moved to
Greenwich, Connecticut where he died in
1964.

Archie Musick
Archie Musick was born January 19, 1902 in Kirksville, Missouri. He attended
Truman State and in 1947, married Irene Kolodziej, who was head of the
ceramics department at the University of Missouri.
His first major mural, "Hard Rock Miners," (1934) was funded by the Public
Works of Art Project and may be seen in the City Auditorium in Colorado
Springs, where for many years he was the art instructor at the Cheyenne
Mountain School.
He spent most of his career in Colorado. He painted post office murals which
were funded by the New Deal Section of Fine Art program; the Red Cloud
mural was painted in 1941 and the Manitou Springs one, "Hunters red and
White," in 1942. In the course of creating "Hunters Red and White," Archie
developed the signature egg tempera/colored pencil technique that he used
for smaller paintings throughout the rest of his life.He wrote a book, Musick Medley:
Intimate Memories of a Rocky
Mountain Art Colony, serving as a
personal view of the art world of
the Colorado Springs region from
the 1920s to the 1950s, including
the Broadmoor Art Academy and
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

George Biddle
George Biddle was born in 1885 to a prominent Philadelphia family. Although he
received a law degree from Harvard University and was admitted to the
Pennsylvania Bar in 1911, Biddle pursued a career in art. Biddle travelled most of
his life throughout the including, Paris to study at the Académie Julian and
Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He studied
printmaking in Munich before going to Paris. In 1917, Biddle also ventured to
Tahiti for isolation and inspiration after serving in the military and divorcing his
wife.
In 1933 Biddle proposed his idea of a government-sponsored mural program
similar to one he witnessed in Mexico to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
After many meetings with Roosevelt and other government officials, the Federal
Arts Program was implemented.
George Biddle executed murals throughout the Americas, including Chicago,
Washington, D.C. and Mexico City. He had his first teaching position at the
Colorado Springs Fine Art Center from December 1936 to June 1937. It was in
Colorado Springs that Biddle executed Death on the Plains both in oil and in
print form as a commentary on the drastic effects of the Dust Bowl droughts on
the mid-Western farm states.
In 1950 George Biddle was appointed to a four-year term on the Fine Arts
Commission by President Truman. He spent his later travelling to Japan,
Southeast Asia, India and Italy. George Biddle died in Croton on November 6,

Eric Bransby
Since the 1940s, Eric Bransby has been among America’s most renowned mural painters. Over
the course of his esteemed career, Bransby has developed a signature style of traditional
Renaissance-based figurative compositions, and has adopted a strong abstract sensibility that
allows him to integrate depictions of the human figure with architecturally-based geometric
shapes.
Of great significance to the Fine Arts Center’s history is that he also studied under master
muralists Boardman Robinson and Jean Charlot at the Fine Arts Center School, where he later
taught. His association with these artists in the 1940s represents one of our enduring
connections to the FAC's predecessor, the Broadmoor Art Academy.
The Fine Arts Center has been privileged to
maintain a 70-year relationship with Eric
Bransby. The FAC has curated many solo and
group exhibitions which included his work,
including the major exhibition From Roots to
Soaring Visions in 2000-2001, which
highlighted both Eric and Mary Ann
Bransby's work. In 1985, Bransby skillfully
restored Boardman Robinson's mural on the
FAC facade, and in 2012, he completed a
spectacular mural celebrating the FAC's 75th
anniversary.
Bransby Continued

Eric Bransby
Bransby became an important muralist and draftsman
in his own right, creating permanent works for
Colorado College, the Pioneers Museum, and the Air
Force Academy among others. In the mid-1980s,
Bransby was commissioned to restore the FAC’s badly-
damaged façade mural originally painted by Boardman
Robinson. Bransby, who still lives and works
in Colorado Springs, received the 2007 Pikes Peak Arts
Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award. At 98, Bransby
continues to create art in his classic realist style and
depicts the nobility of human endeavors.

ELIZA PRATT GREATOREX
Eliza was later recognized as the first woman to be admitted to the
National Academy of Art. Her description of our community was
prophetic:
“We have come home to Colorado Springs. When we first saw the
place, how lonely and far off it seemed! Men working hard with
brains and hands, dwellings so new looking and scattered, women
and children admirable… It has been our home but a few weeks,
yet, in that time we have found the people, their hospitality and
goodness, their earnest and aspiring lives, their true refinement of
nature. One cannot come into such close, general relations with
these people, and not feel that among them will come the
greatest race that earth has yet proceeded. I speak especially of
the women, … man places her nearer to himself, she shares and
guides his life...With the history of this colony are connected tales
of heroism which must perhaps wait for another generation to
recognize...”
Perhaps Eliza saw in this place and its people the true potential of a unique community. Many other
artists followed, establishing studios galleries and school in the Pikes Peak region. Colorado Springs has
benefited for its entire history from a partnership of art, culture and innovation supported by local
philanthropy that has made it unique in the history of Colorado.
Return to ContentsReturn to Artists

HAMILTON HAMILTON
The father of the noted post-impressionist painter
Helen Hamilton, Hamilton Hamilton was one of the
greatest painters of America’s Western frontier.
Born in Oxford England, Hamilton was largely self-
taught. He worked as an illustrator and portraitist,
but he was best-known for his landscape paintings
of Colorado and the American West. In 1873, he
embarked on a sketching expedition to Colorado,
returning with forty-seven paintings created in a
daring, impressionist style. The series helped to
establish Hamilton’s reputation when it was
selected for the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition
of 1876. He was made a full member of the
National Academy of Design in 1889 and went on
to found the important Silvermine Guild of Artists
in Connecticut. His paintings are now held in the
collections of the National Academy of Design
Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Albright-
Knox Art Gallery, the Lowe Art Museum, and the
Columbus Museum of Art.

WALTER PARRISH
Walter Parrish was a talented member of Eliza’s pioneer art colony.
Some of his work has been preserved in the El Paso Club and older
residences in the city.

THOMAS PARRISH
Thomas Clarkson Parrish was born in
Philadelphia on November 17, 1846 to
Edward Parrish and Margaret Shreve Hunt.
Parrish entered the University in 1861 as a
member of the College Class of 1865. He
became a member of the Philomathean
Society before leaving Penn at the close of his
freshman year.
After studying at Harvard University from
1863 to 1864, Parrish was an agent for the U.
S. Sanitary Commission until 1865, and then
briefly, a merchant. In 1872, he moved to
Colorado for his health. Here he became an
artist specializing in etchings and was also
elected to the Colorado State Senate, serving
from 1879 to 1883.
Parrish married twice, first to Fanny Cavender,
and then to Anne May Lodge. He died in
Colorado Springs, Colorado, in November of
1899.

WALTER PARIS
Walter Paris was primarily a watercolorist. Born in London,
England in 1842. Paris was a resident of Colorado Springs,
CO before visiting the Monterey Peninsula during 1875-76.
While there, he shared a studio with his good friend Jules
Tavernier. He was an architect with the British government in
India during 1886-90 and was again in Colorado in 1891. He
became a citizen of the U.S. in 1894 and spent his remaining
years in New York and Washington, DC where he died on
Nov. 26, 1906.

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