Born in Brooklyn, New York, Joseph Imhof was a self-taught lithographer for Currier and Ives in New York City and then became an important documentary painter of Indian life in New Mexico. He is best known for a series of sixty paintings focused on the importance of corn in the culture of the Pueblo Indians.

In 1891, he went to Europe for four years of formal training and apprenticed to artists in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, and Munich. In Antwerp, he met and sketched Buffalo Bill and his Indians in the "Wild West Show," which was making a grand tour of Europe. Ironically, it was this experience with Buffalo Bill in Europe that set the direction of his career rather than his exposure to European artists. How...