Fort Scott Post Office

Mural

"Border Gateways"

1937

Artist

1874-1952

The son of a lithograph salesman, Oscar Berninghaus was educated in St. Louis grammar schools. Even then he sold spot news sketches to the local newspapers. In the tradition of an earlier era of painters, he began work in lithography in 1889 and as a printing apprentice in 1893. Meanwhile, he attended night classes at St. Louis Society of Fine Arts for three terms. Established first as an illustrator and then as a largely self-taught fine artist, he was in the course of getting his first one-man show in St. Louis in 1899.

That year he was the guest of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad on a junket to Colorado. Intrigued by tales of Taos, New Mexico he made a brief side trip twenty-five miles by wagon to the still-untouched village. He returned to Taos each summer after that staying for longer and longer periods until he settled there permanently in 1925.

A member of the prestigious Taos Society of Artists, he created paintings that were of the Pueblo Indians, the Spanish Americans, the adobes and the mountains, generally with at least one horse. With his practice as a lithographic artist and illustrator, his approach was direct and objective, showing the Indians as they were rather than posed or nostalgic stereotypes.