William Victor Higgins (1884–1949) 

Victor Higgins holds the distinction, along with Joseph Henry Sharp, of having had one of his paintings stolen from a museum in broad daylight and returned forty years later with the help of an amateur historical crime researcher. Higgins’s painting Aspens (1932) and Sharp’s Oklahoma Cheyenne were hanging in the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos in 1985 when an unlikely husband-and-wife team—she a retired speech pathologist and he a retired music teacher—lifted both pieces. The art was returned to the museum in 2025, where it remains today.

Victor Higgins grew up in a family of Irish Catholic farmers in Shelby, Indiana. At age fifteen, he left home to study at the Art Institute of Chicago and later the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In 1908, Higgins went to New York where he met Robert Henri, who reputedly taught him about the importance of “the spirit of a place” in painting. He also drew inspiration from the work of Marsden Hartley.

While traveling and studying in France and Germany, Higgins met Walter Ufer and Martin Hennings, both of whom he would see again in Taos when Higgins joined the Taos Society of Artists as its youngest member in 1917.

Higgins is often credited with bringing “modernism” to “realism”; that is, the realism he had been taught at the Royal Academy of Munich. By the 1930s he had almost completely departed from his academic training, focusing instead on landscapes, often experimental landscapes. While living in New Mexico, Higgins also painted portraits of Native American women.

During the Great Depression, Higgins was commissioned, along with three other Taos artists, to paint allegorical murals inside the Taos County Courthouse. Higgins’s contribution to this WPA-financed project was a large panel entitled “Moises, El Legislator” (Moses the Law Giver). The murals remain in the old courthouse on the Taos Plaza, undergoing renovation as of 2026.

In 1937, Victor Higgins married Marion Koogler McNay, an heiress who later founded the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. In an attempt to help advance Higgins’s career, she assumed all his debts, gave him a comfortable studio in her mansion in San Antonio, and paid the rent on his home and studio in Taos. Removed from Taos, Higgins was unable to paint a single painting during the two years the couple were together.