Born in Medford, Massachusetts, William Penhallow Henderson became a painter of Indian motifs, especially New Mexico pueblo dance figures. His work conveyed a highly personal sense of the viewer being with the subjects of his painting, and it was said that he saw beauty everywhere in his surroundings.

He spent much of an unstable childhood with a family that followed the father to a Texas cattle ranch, back to Medford, to a small Kansas town where his father was a banker, and then East again in 1891.

He studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with Edmund Tarbell and won a Paige Traveling Scholarship that allowed him to travel and study in Europe for three years beginning 1901. There he was greatly influenced by ...