About the Artist

A key figure in  20th century New Mexico artistic circles, Dorothy Eugénie Brett (10 November 1883 – 27 August 1977) was an Anglo-American painter, remembered as much for her social life as for her art.

 Dorothy Brett was born to an aristocratic London family and educated in the court of Queen Victoria.  The family lived near Windsor and had homes in London and at Callander in Perthshire, Scotland, where Dorothy spent days fishing in the River Teith and nearby Loch Lubnaig.

In 1910 she attended the Slade School of Art,  where she studied until 1916.  For some time, she occupied a studio on the estate of Lady Ottoline Morrell, where she became a part of the artistic and literary Bloomsbury group, along with Dora Carrington, Barbara Hiles and others. There, she became acquainted with many prominent English figures, such as Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Wolff, Clive Bell, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, and D.H. Lawrence, several of whose portraits she painted. 

During this period, Brett became deaf and is often remembered for the brass ear-trumpet she carried along with her.

In 1924, Brett traveled with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda to visit Taos, New Mexico at the invitation of the prominent Taos society figure Mabel Dodge Luhan and to stay with her. Initially, they all got along well, "but tensions gradually built ... [and] Mabel, in a burst of generosity (and probably to keep Lawrence in Taos) offered Lawrence a tract of 160 acres on her ranch" located some twenty miles northwest of Taos (Bachrach).  The property  has been known as the D. H. Lawrence Ranch ever since its acquisition by the University of New Mexico in the 1950s.

The trio settled at the ranch in May or June  of 1924 and Brett took the smaller of the two cabins on the property. She spent much of her time there painting or typing Lawrence’s manuscripts. After the Lawrences left in 1925, Brett lived alone on the ranch in poverty for several years, surviving by selling her paintings of Pueblo Indians to tourists. Over time, however, her work began to attract attention. 

 In Taos, Brett became a close friend of the well-known art patron Millicent Rogers. Rogers played a significant role in Brett’s artistic career, buying and arranging exhibitions of her works. Rogers was responsible for Brett’s first solo exhibition in New York at the American British Art Gallery in 1950. Later that year, one of Brett’s works was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

She became a United States citizen in 1938 and in later life was  admired as one of the leading personalities of Taos. 

Though Brett had a formal artistic education, she abandoned academic and landscape painting upon her arrival in New Mexico and began to paint Indian subjects. Brett had been fascinated by Indian dances and ceremonials since attending Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in London at the age of five. She traveled with Millicent Rogers to view and paint Indian dances.

Her works are romantic and symbolic in nature, emphasizing her impressions of the Indians’ mysticism and spirituality.  In her works, she sought to “paint the…Indian’s attitude towards life and the world around him. The Indian as he thinks and feels about himself…, the spirit of a Race, the Life behind the Life of a people” (Porter et. al. 1998: 295).  According to Brett, her destiny was to “come all this way from England to find and give the Red Indian his hidden life on canvas”(Ibid).  

Selected exhibitions include the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC, 1932; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, 1950; University of Illinois, 1953; and the American-British Art Club, 1950.

Brett's works are in the collections of Tate Britain, London, UK;  Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; the Buffalo Museum of Science, Buffalo, NY; the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC;  the Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos, NM; the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; ther Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN; and theJonson Gallery of University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, among others.


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