Imhof's career was unusual in its combination of seriousness and patience: a private, methodical artist who lived for two decades adjacent to Taos Pueblo and who earned, by the recognition of the people whose ceremonies he painted, the standing of an authoritative ethnographic chronicler at a moment when most American painters of Native subjects were not seeking that kind of authorization.
Imhof's path into art ran through the working print trades of late-nineteenth-century New York. His self-taught training as a lithographer and his early employment in the New York print business gave him a thorough technical foundation in drawing, plate preparation, and reproduction that would underlie everything he subsequently made. The bookstore he opened with his lithography earnings funded the European art training he undertook in his early twenties.
The European years gave him academic training in the major print and painting centres of the Continent, but the decisive encounter of the period was incidental. The Native American performers travelling with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, whom he sketched at length in Antwerp, gave him a subject and a working method that he would refine for the rest of his life. The experience of drawing Indigenous people directly, rather than through the romantic imagery of the period's American academic painting, set the course of everything that followed.
His return to the United States produced the first serious phase of that work. He studied the Iroquois communities of upstate New York and Canada through the late 1890s, married Sarah, and in his mid-thirties made the trip to the Southwest that would reshape his life. The ceremonies, architecture, and material culture of the Rio Grande Pueblos became, almost immediately, the central subject of his painting, and the working base he established in Albuquerque the following year gave him the platform from which to extend his observation across more than two decades of regional travel.
The move to Taos consolidated his practice. The studio he purchased faced the sacred mountains of the Pueblo and stood adjacent to Pueblo land, and the next quarter-century of his life was spent in close working contact with the community. He maintained a lithography press, taught the medium to other artists, collected Pueblo artifacts on a substantial scale, and produced the body of large, simplified paintings that constitute the documentary record of his career. His authority within the Pueblo community itself was unusual: the people whose ceremonies he was painting recognized him as a serious and accurate witness, and his neighbour Mabel Dodge Luhan, the central figure of literary Taos and his neighbour of twenty years, gave him the name by which he is now most often described.
His final major project was the Kivas and Corn series, a sequence of paintings concerned with the central place of corn in Pueblo religious and agricultural life. The work crowned a career devoted with unusual constancy to a single subject, and his position today is that of one of the most accomplished and authoritative non-Native chroniclers of Pueblo life in the early-to-mid twentieth century.