Ernest Martin Hennings

Ernest Martin Hennings, recorded in the market and in exhibition catalogues both as Ernest Martin Hennings and as E. Martin Hennings, was born on February 5, 1886, in Penns Grove, New Jersey. He left New Jersey for Chicago and enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago around 1901. He graduated with honors on June 17, 1904, and continued studying there for about two more years, for a total of roughly five years of training. He reportedly declined an American Traveling Scholarship at graduation in order to work as a commercial artist, though this detail comes from a single dealer biography that also compresses prizes he actually won years later.

In 1912, after taking second prize in a painting competition associated with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Hennings traveled to Munich and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied for about two years. He returned to Chicago, joined the Palette and Chisel Club, and won the club's Ullrich Gold Medal in 1916. He first traveled to Taos, New Mexico, in 1917, made Taos his permanent home in 1921, and joined the Taos Society of Artists in 1924. He remained in Taos, painting Pueblo and Hispano subjects and the region's landscape, for the rest of his life. Hennings died on May 19, 1956, in Taos, and was buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie, Illinois, near Chicago, the city Wikipedia describes as his hometown.

Hennings was recognized within his lifetime rather than rediscovered after death, which is itself a marker of his standing among the Taos painters. The Smithsonian American Art Museum credits his compositions with winning twelve national prizes between 1916 and 1938, a run that included the Isidor Medal and the Ranger Fund Purchase Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1926 and the Walter Lippincott Prize from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1925. His work was selected for the Venice Biennale in 1924, an international exhibition in Paris in 1926, and the Paris Salon in 1927, placing him among the relatively small number of Taos Society members shown at that level abroad. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so his standing here is described through documented prizes and exhibition venues rather than quoted opinion.

Hennings's auction market centers on Western and Taos Society subject matter and remains comparatively thin in volume for a historically significant American painter. Multiple market databases, including MutualArt and Heritage Auctions, cite USD 1,553,000 as the highest price recorded for a Hennings painting, for the work Indian Summer, sold on November 29, 2007. The auction house and sale city for that result are not confirmed in the sources reviewed for this profile and should be verified against the original sale record before being cited as a house specific record. Another notable result is a reported USD 740,000 at Bonhams on August 4, 2012, well below the 2007 result.

No catalogue raisonne of Hennings's work has been identified, so buyers should rely on established auction house specialists in Taos Society and Southwestern material and on close provenance research rather than a single reference catalogue. No current exclusive gallery or estate representation was confirmed for this profile; his paintings circulate primarily on the secondary market through dealers and auction houses that specialize in early Taos and Santa Fe painting. Because his public auction record is comparatively small in number, any single result, including the widely cited 2007 high for Indian Summer, should be read as one data point rather than as a reliable trend line.