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Louis Akin Biography

Born in Portland, Oregon, Louis Akin is associated with Grand Canyon views as well as scenes from Hopi Indian life. He is likely the best known of the Arizona landscape painters in the early 20th century.

His family had emigrated from Iowa to Oregon in 1852. As a young man, he worked as a sign painter and then studied in New York City with William Merritt Chase and Frank DuMond. In 1901, "Harper's Weekly" published his illustrations," and in 1903, he was sent by Santa Fe Railway personnel to paint the Hopi Indians in Oraibi, Arizona. For eighteen months, he stayed in the Hopi Pueblo of Oraibi where he rented a room for seventy-five cents a week. By 1904, he had completed a series of Hopi paintings and, given the name "Mapli," he was initiated into their secret society. He also published an article sympathetic to their cultural conflicts with Anglo society and, going to New York for several years, tried to organize a colony of artists to paint the Hopi in Arizona.

However, his main objective in going to New York was to exhibit his work, which he did in a one-man show at Clausen Gallery on Fifth Avenue. It was well received by critics who were intrigued by the subject matter but thought his painting skills needed work. Soon after the Clausen exhibit, he returned to Arizona to live permanently, having terminated a romance with a woman who found another man and having been told the Southwestern climate would be good for his tubercular condition. He rented a studio apartment in Flagstaff in 1906, and shortly after completed a painting El Tovar at the Grand Canyon for the Santa Fe Railroad.

His most spectacular and widely distributed painting was El Tovar Hotel, Grand Canyon, of 1907. Commissioned by the Railroad, it is a panoramic view of the newly completed El Tovar Hotel on the rim of the South Canyon with Hopi figures and a Mexican rider on the road. It became one of his most famous works and one of the best known paintings of the Southwest, widely reproduced on railroad posters.

Interestingly when he returned to Arizona, he turned away from Hopi Indians as his primary subjects to landscape painting where he focused on dramatic mountain views, immense canyons, and rock formations. During this time, some of his work including The Oraibi Plaza and Storm over the Grand Canyon was reproduced and sold to tourists at Santa Fe Railroad stations.

Akin lived the last seven years of his life in Flagstaff where he had a studio at Babbitt Bros. store and slept on the floor. He was continually troubled by debt, and tiring of him not paying his bills, the El Tovar proprietor referred to him as a "hotel beat". Many friends including Santa Fe Railroad personnel loaned him money, and he determined to stir more interest in Grand Canyon paintings by making them panoramic and dramatic in the style of Albert Bierstadt.

Seeking new subject matter, he returned to Portland, Oregon, which stirred his interest in the Pacific Northwest. He took painting trips into Glacier National Park and the Fraser River area of British Columbia. In 1910, he married briefly, a Philadelphia girl named Mai Ritchie, who became his art student in Flagstaff. It was a painful, unhappy time for him, and he turned his energy to a commission for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to decorate its Southwest Indian room. He did a lot of sketching at the Hopi villages for the murals of which he completed twenty paintings of Pueblo Indian genre.

The last year of his life, 1912, he revisited many Indian villages and then prepared to go to New York to show his sketches from these visits to promote exhibitions. However, a few days before Christmas he became ill and shortly thereafter died of pneumonia. He is buried in the Flagstaff cemetery facing the San Francisco Peaks.