Western Paintings and Sculpture including Contemporary Native American Art Session I

Provenance:

Estate of Avis Hope Truska, Scottsdale, Arizona

Acquired by 1920

Literature:

Painting will appear in the forthcoming E.I. Couse Catalogue Raisonné by Virginia Couse Leavitt, granddaughter of artist

In Watching the Rising Trout, E.I. Couse gives his fondness for depicting contemplative Native subjects a definite object: the concentric rings of a trout rising in a stream under an overhanging bough. Despite the stillness, there is tension in this teaching moment as elder teaches younger something about the very different clocks and schedules that the natural world runs on. When the aquatic nymphs of insects—mayflies and stoneflies and caddis—begin to make their way up from the stream bed to emerge and sprout wings, the trout turn on like lights and rise to gorge on them. Since Couse has painted the overhanging branch, it could also be that ants or grasshoppers or caterpillars have tumbled into the pool and roused the trout. At any rate, now is the time to fish, now that the fish are showing themselves. Standing behind the man and boy, the girl, though she is just as attentive, seems less convinced. Perhaps she has already heard her share of trout tales unaccompanied by actual trout (“No trout were harmed in the making of this story,” might be the way we’d say it). But perhaps it’s past the children’s bedtime and the girl’s frown is sleepiness. Stars peek through the branches and the light Couse is throwing around, dappling beautifully here and there, is the moonlight he was famous for in his paintings, light that is often the best for trouting. Watching the Rising Trout becomes, then, a kind of nocturne, in the musical as well as in the artistic sense of the word, as the silence is broken only by the splash of the fish, and the concentric rings in the water are almost like the orbits of heavenly bodies.

-James D. Balestrieri