LeConte Stewart, 1891-1990
November Hills, 1925
Oil on canvas
24 x 30 inches
LeConte Stewart sought to capture the nobility and subtle beauty of Utah's landscapes and rural life. Influenced by Tonalist / Realist masters during his formal art education at the Art Students League in New York, returned to Utah as a young man determined to capture the emotion of a scene, even if it went against the conventional notion of a "pretty" picture. Here, Stewart shows poplar trees devoid of leaves and fields in their muddy, uncultivated state. But, he found deep aesthetic value inm the modulations of color, the quiet dignity of farm homesteads, and the hints of seasonal change that mirror life's advance for both nature and human life.
SIGNATURE
Signed and dated lower right
PROVENANCE
LeConte Stewart Family by descent
EXHIBITION
2012 joint exhibiton at the LDS Church History Museum and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showcasing LeConte Stewart's landscape and depression era works.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LeConte Stewart Masterworks / Muir, Poulton, Davis, Poulton and Swanson, 2012. Page 63, plate 29.
Mahonri Young (1877-1957)
Pinon In Navajo Land
Etching
7.5 x 9.5 inches (site)
Framed: 16 x 18 inches
LeConte Stewart (1891 - 1990)
A Blue Day, 1925
oil on canvas affixed to board
12 x 16 inches
From his early training in the Art Students League in New York, LeConte Stewart adopted the design language of his instructors that often included a road that leads viewers' eyes into the picture. In this remarkable painting, Stewart creates an air of mystery by showing a turn in the road that we viewers must imagine as it continues into the grouping of rural houses and barns. He also uses intense blues, a favorite winter hue of the artist which gives the scene an otherworldly, almost magical sense. However, for those who have walked down a snow-covered dirt road in early evening, one can almost feel the prickly cold and the cold air in the lungs.
SIGNATURE
Signed and dated right bottom corner; lower left To my friend Kay Harms, Dec. 2, 1928
PROVENANCE
David Dee Fine Arts
Private Collection, Salt Lake City
Private Collection, Bountiful, Utah
Hiroshi Yoshida (1876 - 1950)
Grand Canyon, 1925
10 1/4 x 15 5/8 inches
woodblock print
A romantic realist, Yoshida’s style resembles that of an English 19th Century watercolorist applied to Japanese themes. Yoshida is noted for subtle colors and naturalistic atmosphere. This stunning print captures the stark contrasts of light and shadow, red rock and white snow of the Grand Canyon in winter solitude.
Hiroshi Yoshida is known as a Western-style painter and printmaker. Born in Kurume, Japane, he lived and worked in Tokyo. He first painted landscapes in oil, but earned early fame as a watercolorist. He developed an interest in printmaking in 1920 and self-printed all of his work excepting his first seven prints. His early printwork depicted views of Swiss and American landscapes.
Fond of traveling, Yoshida was also an avid alpinst, with mountains and water figuring prominently in his works. A significant contributor to and organizer of important exhibitions at the Toledo Museum of Art, Yoshida’s work was well represented, with 113 prints in a 1930 Japanese print exhibition, and 66 prints in a 1936 show. A romantic realist, Yoshida’s style resembles that of an English 19th Century watercolorist applied to Japanese themes. Hiroshi Yoshia is noted for subtle colors and naturalistic atmosphere. His works won numberous prizes in Japan and in the world, gaining strong Western influences during his travels. He later established the Japan Alpine Artist Association.
Source: Castle Fine Arts, www.castlefinearts.com
Louise Richards Farnsworth (1878 - 1969)
Fall Tree
Oil on canvas
11 x 14 inches
Birger Sandzen (1871 - 1954)
The Red Canyon, 1927
lithograph
17 x 22.25 inches
DESCRIPTION
Pencil-signed and titled The Red Canyon is a view of the Colorado River, near Moab, Utah.
SIGNATURE
Pencil signed - title lower left and signed lower right. Printed signature and dated lower right.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Charles Pelham Greenough, The Graphic Work of Birger Sandzen, Birger Sandzen Memorial Foundation, 2001, L - 117
Birger Sandzen (1871 - 1954)
Timberline Snow, 1925
lithograph
9 7/8 x 13.75 inches
DESCRIPTION
A pencil-signed and titled vista of Pike's Peak, with cedars in the foreground. Executed on cream laid paper, in a wooden frame.
Birger Sandzen (1871 - 1954)
Arroyo with Trees, 1925
lithograph
12 x 18 inches
A pencil-signed and titled image of trees before a Southwestern gully.
LeConte Stewart, 1891 - 1990
The Ford Home, Centerville, 1926
Oil on canvas
12 x 16 inches
LeConte Stewart painted scenes that came alive for him. In the case of “The Ford Home,” it was a stately 19th century pioneer home at the end of a bitter cold fall day. Early snow had beaten down the pasture grass and the trees were shedding their dead leaves. But for the artist, there was vitality in the air, a buzzing of blue, white, and rust tones that moved him. As Vern Swanson has written, Stewart at his best, "depicted the transitory nature of light, color, and air in all their resonant enchantments." (LeConte Stewart Masterworks, p. 50
SIGNATURE
signed and dated lower right
PROVENANCE
LeConte Stewart Family by descent
exhibitions
2012 joint exhibiton at the LDS Church History Museum and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showcasing LeConte Stewart's landscape and depression era works.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LeConte Stewart Masterworks / Muir, Poulton, Davis, Poulton and Swanson, 2012. Page 71, plate 41 (incorrectly labeled Pioneer House).
James T. Harwood, 1860-1940
Mount Timpanogos from Utah Lake, Utah, 1928
Oil on canvas on board
14.50 x 26.75 inches
J.T. Harwood is not generally considered the “father” of Utah art. He was more. A talented and gifted painter, he set a new standard for his peers and later generations of Utah artists. By studying in Paris at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts, he was the first artist to give Utah art legitimacy. In winning a medal at the prestigious French Salon, he was the first painter from the state to truly transcend it. He was not the father of Utah art; he was its first star; he was its core.
Despite his success abroad, Utah and its beauty were central to his work. The academies of Paris taught him skills and sophistication, but it was his home state that provided his best subject matter. He loved hiking and climbing along the Wasatch Range and was attracted to its rugged landscapes and peaks like Mt. Olympus. He was, as his friend and patron Alice Merrill Horne posited, “Utah’s strenuous painter.”[1] Yet, it was the region around Lehi, the place of his birth, that he loved most. He knew the small histories of the area and proclaimed that “every mile of the way had great interest to me.”[2] Speaking of Harwood’s deeply rooted connections to this place, Horne stated:
Lehi is well suited to the life of an observing child. The lake, the mountain, and the field are stored with riches…The distant mountains and the low hills, the lake, the mountain streams, the orchard, and the grain patches, the truck garden, and the meadows – were all sources of inspiration. So among Lehi haunts, James T. Harwood found inspiration for a multitude of pictures.[3]
Mt. Timpanogos from Utah Lake is one of these pictures. In his lifetime, it was his lake paintings, captured in “various effects and with different mediums,” that were seen as particularly charming.[4] This is true of this remarkable example, with its representation of the jagged western coastline of Utah Lake arcing toward a distant Mt. Timpanogos. Few, abroad, would associate arid Utah with such a scene of sublime and subtle beauty. For one in tune with this place, however, beauty, as demonstrated in this painting, was abundantly found in Utah’s lakes, mountains, and “every mile of the way.”
Dr. James R. Swensen, Professor of Art History and the History of Photography, Brigham Young University.
[1] Alice Merrill Horne, Devotees and their Shrines: A Handbook of Utah Art (Salt Lake City, UT: The Deseret News, 1914), 51.
[2] J.T. Harwood, A Basket of Chips: An Autobiography by James Taylor Harwood (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), 136.
[3] Horne, 51.
[4] Ibid., 54.
Albert Looking Elk (1899 - 1940)
untitled (Taos pueblo snow scene)
oil on board
7 x 10 inches
signed lower right
Maynard Dixon, 1875-1946
Home in the Desert (Lone Pine), 1929
Oil on canvas
16 x 19.50 inches
In the summer of 1929, Dixon, his wife photographer Dorothea Lange, and their two sons Daniel and John, journeyed to California's Owens Valley, There, they stayed with the Skinner Family at Lone Pine. Maynard sketched and painted in the Alabama Hills near Lonee Pine, expored the Panamint Mountains, and visited Shoshone and Paiute Indian camps. Dixon considered the encroaching commercial activity of the area destructive of the social structure of small towns, and felt an impending sense of doom. Perhaps it was this unease that led him to paint "Home in the Desert (Lone Desert)", since it conveys a protective, old growth pine offering shelter and calm to a ranch house.
SIGNATURE
Signed with initials, inscribed and dated 'MD / Lone Pine / May 1929' (lower right) numbered and titled '373-B' (on the reverse), with the artist's printed San Francisco address label (on the reverse)
PROVENANCE
L. B. Curtis, Tucson, Arizona
Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery Inc., Tucson, Arizona
Private Collections, Salt Lake City, Utah
BIBLIOGRAPHY
W. Burnside, Maynard Dixon: Artist of the West, Provo, Brigham Young University Press, 1974, p. 171
M. Sublette, Maynard Dixon's American West: Along the Distant West, Tucson, Just Me Publishing, LLC, 2018, fig. 236, p. 204, illustrated.
Listed as #378-B on Maynard Dixon's master painting list.
Waldo Midgley (1888-1986)
Alligator and turtle
etching
3.75 x 5.5 (site)
Maynard Dixon, 1875-1946
Pueblo Mountains, 1929
Oil on board
10 x 14 inches
For those who knew Maynard Dixon and his work there were often three things that constituted the “basic elements” of his pictures: form, color, and country. According to Arthur Millier, Dixon’s “vision of the West is so true that we have come to see the region through the forms and colors of his paintings.” “He recreates the West,” Millier continued, “in terms of its own rhythms, its own forms, its own color, its own light.”[1] The painter LeConte Stewart also recognized these connections. Writing about his friend’s work, Stewart acknowledged Dixon’s superb draughtsmanship, but saw something more. “[I]f you can travel through the high desert country and not have memories of Dixon’s color and design come flooding in every turn, then either you don’t know his paintings, or your eyes have never trained to see the West.”[2]
Today, Dixon is primarily known for form: his depictions of the hard-edge patterns, rhythms, and shapes of the American West. He is seen more as a formalist than colorist. Indeed, one of the artist’s most important and enduring talents was his ability to depict the “bare-breasted and stark” landscapes of the region.[3] Yet, it is important to remember, as Millier and Stewart noted, that in Dixon’s best work form and color were essential in his representation of the western landscape. On closer inspection it is possible to see his bold use of color in pointillist azure skies, corral red and orange sandstone cliffs, purple and indigo shadows, and the golden yellow brilliance of autumnal cottonwoods.
Painted in 1929 in oppressive July heat somewhere in a “very little known country” between the Pueblo Mountains of southern Oregon and Alder Creek Ranch in northern Nevada, this work is emblematic of Dixon’s love of color – pure color.[4] In a majority of his paintings, it is clear that the Dixon loved the matted surface of woven canvas, which so beautifully replicates the granular quality of a desert landscape. Yet, in this remarkable painting it is possible to see the artist’s adroit handling of paint, employing and mixing a wide range of colors, from mauve foothills to a tangerine streak cutting across the middle ground, to represent the subtle beauty of this otherwise pedestrian Great Basin valley. Roughly ten years earlier, Dixon provided a remarkable parallel to this oil-sketch in his poem titled (appropriately) “Color:”
At evening as I walk the peaceful slopes,
With joy indrawing the swift-passing hues,
Tinting so tenderly the sunset hills
Veiled in the valley, deep in blue ravines,
I know that here at last I see revealed
The wonder-changing colors of the Soul.[5]
Few other works by the artist are as colorful, as painterly, or as bold. Indeed, this painting can be said to highlight the skills and eye of Maynard Dixon, Expressionist.
- Dr. James R. Swensen, Professor of Art History and the History of Photography, Brigham Young University.
[1] Arthur Millier, “Introduction,” in Maynard Dixon: Painter of the West (Tucson: Unknown, 1945), n.p.
[2] LeConte Stewart, “Maynard Dixon, Artist,” September 1945, LeConte Stewart Papers, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[3] Maynard Dixon, “I am,” in Rim-Rock and Sage: The Collected Poems of Maynard Dixon (San Francisco: The California Historical Society, 1977), 123).
[4] Federal Writer’s Program (WPA), Nevada: A Guide to the Silver State (Portland, OR: Binfords & Mort), 212. See also Donald J. Hagerty, “Out There, Somewhere; Maynard Dixon and Nevada,” in Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada (New York: Rizzoli Electra and the Nevada Museum of Art, 2024), 238-241.
[5] Maynard Dixon, “Color” [1918] in Rim-Rock and Sage: The Collected Poems of Maynard Dixon (San Francisco: The California Historical Society, 1977), 81.
LeConte Stewart, 1891-1990
Jack's Ranch, Nevada, July 1930
Oil on canvas on board
12 x 16 inches
Jack’s Ranch is located in Tuscarora, Nevada, roughly 45 minutes north of Elko by car. Like Maynard Dixon, Stewart was drawn to sagebrush for its hardiness and abstract patterns of growth. As a Tonalist, he went further than Dixon in portraying the shimmering silvers and grays that brought the desert alive for him. The humble ranch buildings, made of natural materials like clay and wood, were dignified and honorable in their survival against the elements and in their protection of the inhabitants.
Robert O. Davis wrote of Stewart’s attraction to the desert, “From boyhood, LeConte loved the deserts, mountains, and valleys of Utah’s uninhabited landscape, and found himself drawn to lonely scenes. Painting the arid countryside of LeConte’s youth brought out his early feelings of love and respect for it, and at the same time a forbidding fear, loneliness, and dreariness."
SIGNATURE
Signed, dated and location lower right
Reverse, title, date and label
PROVENANCE
LeConte Stewart Family by descent
CONDITION
Excellent
Birger Sandzen (1871 - 1954)
Utah Poplars, 1930
lithograph
20 x 16 inches
Description
A pencil-signed and titled lithographic composition of tall poplar trees.
Carl Oscar Borg (1879-1947)
Hopi Village, Walpi, 1932
drypoint etching
7.50 x 7.50 inches
J. Henri Moser, 1876-1951
untitled
Oil on canvas
24.50 x 30 inches
Swiss-born Henri Moser emigrated to Utah as a boy, and studied with well-known Utah artist and educator A.B. Wright from 1906 to 1908. Moser trained in Paris starting in 1908, and was deeply influenced by Expressionist and Fauvist movements. After returning to Utah in 1911, he became a catalyst for modernist painting in the state.
Conrad Buff (1886-1975)
Zion, 1931
lithograph
12.50 x 17.25 inches
Born and raised in the conservatism of nineteenth-century Switzerland, Conrad Buff spent a restless youth seeking an outlet for his artistic spirit. His talent would flourish in the majestic landscape and creative individualism of the American West. In the opening decade of the new century, his arrival in California coincided with the flowering of a dynamic movement in American art. Sketching and painting en plein air, Buff was inspired by the grandeur of the High Sierras and the drama of the wind-sculpted desert. In a long and prodigious career he bridged the coloration and brushwork of impressionism with the abstraction and structure of modern art. (Source: The Art and Life of Conrad Buff, by Libby Buff, George Stem, Will South) In the 1920s, a Los Angeles art critic wrote, “Conrad Buff comprehends the enormity of the West. More than that, he adds thereto a discernment of the stylized and conventionalized forms in which the West abound. Not one artist in a hundred grasps the significance of the West’s dynamic forms.”
Selected Collections:
Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery
MOA at Brigham Young University
Laguna Art Museum
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Abandoned Ranch (Lonesome Ranch), Los Banos, California, July 1935
oil on canvas affixed to board
22.75 x 26 inches
Maynard Dixon's portrayal of the American West reflects his own attitudes and artistic imagination, which served to bring current modern art movements to a new level. Throughout his prolific and varied career, Dixon believed deeply in self-expression and pursued art for its own sake. An individual who personally shunned formal academic training because of its confining structure, Dixon created his own unique vision of the great West and has left a profound and authentic record of the American landscape.
During the mid 1930s, Dixon painted some of his most poignant images that captured post Depression-era California and the maritime strikes of 1934. His graphic and brooding narratives of destitute migrant workers had a strong influence on the artist's landscape painting. "In addition to the strike pictures, Maynard painted the broader issues of a depression-era West, canvases that project human isolation and alienation resulting from an unparalleled social upheaval. In tracing his evolution toward this new art, he explained:
Gradually I broadened out. Starting with a more romantic approach I work slowly toward a more psychological approach. This led, among other things, to a shift of emphasis from an exclusively Western point of view to a broader American outlook. I began to approximate the kind of American art for which Bellows, Sloan and others had fought 30 years ago, and which only recently has become an accepted school...The depression woke me up to the fact that I had a part in all this, as an artist...Painting as I see it, must be human rather than arty. Painting is a means to an end. It is my way of saying what I want you to comprehend. It is my testimony in regard to life, and therefore I cannot lie in paint." (as quoted in D.J. Hagerty, Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon, Layton, Utah, 1993, pp. 205-06)
According to scholar, Donald Hagerty, in the summer of 1935 Dixon traveled with fellow artist Ray Strong to the agricultural fields and migrant labor camps around Shafter, California. The two painters continued north exploring the San Joaquin Valley until they reached Coalinga, where Dixon came across the farm depicted in Abandoned Ranch, situated where the valley floor meets the Coast Range of the Coalinga area. "In this sprawling array of hills, grass, and sky, Dixon discovered the rural economy had been shattered by the Depression. Small ranchers, unable to cope, had fled the land, leaving their livelihood and homes behind. Where once these hills had hosted numerous cattle and sheep ranches, not one remained." In Abandoned Ranch, Dixon captures the haunting isolation of a bygone era surrounded by the natural and understated beauty of the rugged American landscape composed in the artist's personally reflective yet modern aesthetic.
SIGNATURE
signed and dated 'Maynard Dixon/July 1935' (lower right)
Our internal notes say that the painting is #532 on Dixon's master list
PROVENANCE
Edith Hamlin, wife of the artist.
Private collection, Oklahoma, circa 1970s.
By descent to the present owner.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Donald J. Hagerty's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's works.
CONDITION
Excellent - Relined - Per Christie's 2008 Auction - The work was lined at the time, so we do not have an image of the original canvas reverse.
LeConte Stewart, 1891 - 1990
Porterville, Utah, c. 1950's
Oil on board
17.5 x 24 inches
Porterville was a 30 minute drive from Stewart’s home in Kaysville up Weber Canyon along the route of the original intercontinental rail system. In 1950, it probably felt like traveling back in time several decades. Stewart readily admitted to arranging elements in a picture to create a design and feeling that moved him. In this somewhat disjointed scene, there is an abstracted quality to the field on the right that pulls us in and makes us question what we are seeing. After over a decade of heading the University of Utah Department of Art, Stewart well understood the influence of modern art, and here seems to employ some of its language within the paradigm of realism to which he was firmly committed.
SIGNATURE
Lower left
CONDITION
Excellent
LeConte Stewart, 1891-1990
On the Middle Fork (Wintry Stream)
Oil on board
16 x 20 inches
SOLD
George Dibble (1904 - 1992)
Valley Sunset #26
Watercolor
20 x 28 inches
