Joseph Adam Imhof was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1871. He was hired as a lithographer by Currier and Ives, and by 1891, had earned enough money to pursue a formal art education in Europe. He spent four years in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, and Munich where he worked as an apprentice to various artists. Upon returning to New York City, Imhof rented a studio and began to study the Iroquois Indians in New York and Canada. For ten years, he painted and improved his lithography and photography which financed his early artistic career.
In 1905 Imhof visited the Southwest for the first time and took advantage of the opportunity to document the lives of the Pueblo People. He built a studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1906, and eventually settled in Taos, New Mexico permanently. Enamored with the Native Pueblo People, he painted and created prints of daily life as well as of their ceremonies.
This lithograph, created roughly a decade before his death, captures a quiet multi-storied pueblo on a cold winter morning. The fires within sending wisps of smoke up through the many chimneys create a feeling of interior warmth against the chill of the weather outside. The soft, freshly fallen snow that covers the ground is untouched except for the two figures and their heavily laden donkeys setting off on a journey.
