Fremont Ellis was one of the founders of Los Cinco Pintores — the small group of young modernists who established Santa Fe's reputation as a serious American art colony in the early 1920s — and the last surviving member of that group, working as a landscape painter in New Mexico for more than sixty years.
Fremont Ellis (October 2, 1897 – January 12, 1985) was an American landscape painter and a founding member of Santa Fe's Los Cinco Pintores. Born in Virginia City, Montana, the son of an itinerant dentist and theater operator and a milliner, he received almost no formal schooling — the family's frequent moves cut his early education short — and he was largely self-taught as a painter. He had his first exhibition in El Paso, Texas, while still in his teens, and after a brief detour into optometry at his father's insistence, he settled permanently in Santa Fe in 1919 to commit himself fully to painting. His only formal art training was a short period of study at the Art Students League in New York in 1925.
In 1921, two years after his arrival in Santa Fe, he joined Jozef Bakos, Walter Mruk, Will Shuster, and Willard Nash to form Los Cinco Pintores — "The Five Painters" — a self-organized group of young modernists committed to bringing serious contemporary art to the people of Santa Fe. The group disbanded in 1926, but Ellis continued working in New Mexico until his death and outlived the other four. His landscapes received the Huntington Award for best landscape at the Los Angeles Museum in 1924, the Hazel Hyde Morrison Prize and Bronze Medal at the Oakland Museum, and a gold medal at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City in 1975. His paintings are held in the collections of the New Mexico Museum of Art, UCLA, the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, the El Paso Museum of Art, and the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, among others.