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Henry C. Balink
American, 1882-1963
With the onset of World War I in 1914, Henry Balink and his new bride, Maria Wessing, immigrated to New York City and where he took on the name Henry Balink. On assignment from the Archaeological Museum in Berlin and the Louvre in Paris, he began copying works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and soon became employed by them.
Chicago was his next destination where he began doing murals and taking on private portrait commissions. Though he had some success at this, Henry Balink was fascinated by the travel poster he saw in a railroad station about Taos, New Mexico. This led to a brief stay there in 1917 and occasional trips to the Southwest until, after returning home from a visit to Holland and Germany in 1922, he and his wife moved to Santa Fe permanently in 1924.
In the 1930s Henry Balink taught art and sculpture at the Santa Fe Indian School. After the second world war, he trained George Phippen and advised Dwight D. Eisenhower on his beginning painting efforts. Henry Balink invented a new type of crayon and worked on perfecting a duo tone etching technique that he had begun learning while he was at the Royal Academie. He also carved fine furniture as well as creating beautiful frames which were sold with most of Balink's paintings. Many of these works hang in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Museum of Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Henry Balink died in Santa Fe in 1963.
Bibliography
1. "American Western Art" by Dorothy Harmsen, Southwest Art October 1984
2. The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West by Peggy and Harold Samuels.
3. "A Portrait of Native America: Indians and the Art of Henry C. Balink, 1882-1963" by Pieter Hovens
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