Oscar Edmund Berninghaus. Oscar Edmund Berninghaus was an American artist and a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists.
He is best known for his paintings of Native Americans, New Mexico and the American Southwest. His son, Charles Berninghaus, was also a Taos artist.
Berninghaus was born on October 2, 1874, in St. Louis, Missouri. His father ran a lithography business, which stimulated an interest in watercolor painting in Oscar.
The young artist regularly sketched local scenes around St. Louis, including the St. Louis riverfront. He developed an interest in business and sold his works to tourists and newspapers.
At sixteen, he had quit school and taken a job with Compton & Sons, a local lithography company, where he started as an errand boy, but soon learned the technical details of engraving, color separation and printmaking. In 1893, he left Compton & Sons and joined Woodward and Tiernan, one of the largest printing concerns in the world at the time. In search of something more than the practical experience he was receiving at the lithography companies, Berninghaus attended night classes at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and sketched and painted in his spare time. By 1899, Berninghaus held his first one-man show, developed a reputation as an artist, and worked teaching illustration at the School of Fine Arts. He was offered a commission by the Denver