Dorothy Newkirk Stewart:Santa Fe Artist and Printmaker

It’s official: the McFarland catalog announcing its fall releases is out today. The cover design is bright, eye‑catching, and true to Dorothy’s colorful artistic expression.

I couldn’t have asked for better timing. Visitors to the exhibition at 553 Canyon Road, in the beautiful, historic Edwin C. Brooks house, can now find all the information they need to preorder the book.

The cover features an oil painting titled Peach Thieves, a whimsical scene of youngsters scaling tree limbs for low‑hanging fruit. Dorothy’s fantastical vision of blue‑green trees set against vermilion‑orange hills is thought to depict Maria Chabot’s peach orchards at Los Luceros, a historic property in New Mexico known for its prized fruit crops.

To provide a little context, Mary Cabot Wheelwright,a wealthy Bostonian, who owned Los Luceros at that time, presented Maria with an attractive opportunity to work and live on the ranch, which she then bequeathed to her in 1945. In Maria’s 1948 correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe, housed in the O’Keeffe Archive, she specifically mentions ordering five hundred fruit trees,as well as planting lettuce fields and pea crops.

Today,the beautifully preserved 148-acre Los Luceros on the Rio Grande is open to the public and considered one of New Mexico’s loveliest historic sites. During my upcoming visit to Santa Fe, I plan to spend an afternoon at there, exploring the very spaces my story’s heroines once inhabited. I love living history.