In Taos, Lawrence encountered the Pueblo Indians, whose religion awakened in him a new sense of time. He touched the lives of three women who gave shape to Taos’ social life for nearly half a century.

In one sense Lawrence was similar to the thousands of tourists who return to Taos every year to recharge batteries worn down by city life. Lawrence, too, thrived in the “magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico.”

He loved the pristine mountains and the shadows of clouds blowing across the sagebrush-dotted desert.

He spent relatively little time there, less than two years spread over three visits in the early ‘20s, but his impact on Taos was great. He worked on several books about 15 miles north of the town at a ranch given him by Mabel Dodge Luhan, a social maverick of the Dodge family who had brought Lawrence to Taos.

For years thereafter her large adobe hacienda was a salon for the artistically great and near great, people who were attracted by the magic of Taos and by Lawrence’s mythic figure.

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Also a part of the heritage are the Luhan house’s bathroom windows, painted by Lawrence to keep the prurient from gazing upon Mabel during her ablutions. The purpose sounds un-Lawrentian, but perhaps in every would-be satyr lurks a touch of the puritan.

That painting hangs rather incongruously among the nymphs and fawns of Lawrence’s “banned in Britain” paintings.