CARDSTON CANADA
OCT 6 A.M. 1920
Oil on paperboard
6.75 X 8.5 Inches
Retail Price $ 20,000
Holiday Sale $ 15,000
On the bottom edge of this painting LeConte Stewart recorded that it was created on October 6 sometime in the “A.M.” By this date, in Alberta, Canada, the sun does not rise until around 7:30, which might not have given the observant painter much time to locate and record this nondescript, yet remarkable set of trees before noon.
Autumn Morning was made during an important period in the artist’s career. Stewart was in Alberta on assignment; his primary task was to paint the murals in the Cardston Temple for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With the help of this commission, his career was on its ascendency. He would soon begin teaching, first at Ogden High School and later at the University of Utah, where he would influence a generation of Utah artists. During this time, he would also hone his craft and become one of the leading landscape painters in the American tradition.
This painting is also an early example of the primary characteristics of Stewart’s best work. Throughout his career, he tried to avoid the sentimental; he wanted, as Wallace Stegner observed, to avoid all “prettification.”[1] Furthermore, he disliked verdant scenes and generally selected nondescript subjects for his paintings. He chose to paint outdoors from “late fall to early spring” during seasons most fair-weather painters tried to avoid.[2] Mud, winter’s chill, and snowy roads were not deterrents for Stewart.
On this Wednesday, probably before working on the temple murals in the afternoon, Stewart captured a scene in which the brilliant colors of fall were already muted, and the browning leaves were nearly ready to fall. This aligns with the artist’s aesthetic. “I would rather paint the cool violet and the somber gray ashes of late autumn and winter than the brilliant red and orange fires of fall,” he asserted.[3] Elsewhere Stewart explained, “I am trying to cut a slice of contemporary life as it is in the highways and byways, as I have found it…I cannot ignore the call of life in the raw.”[4] Thus, what really made art great, he argued, was its ability to capture “a time of day, or a season of year, as well as a place.”[5] This is exactly what Stewart did on a chilly October morning in Canada.
-Dr. James R. Swensen, Professor of Art History and the History of Photography, Brigham Young University.
[1] Wallace Stegner, “The Power of Homely Detail,” American Heritage 36, no. 5 (August/September 1985): 64.
[2] Gregory C. Thompson, “Sketches from Life: LeConte Stewart,” American Artist 49 (November 1985): 114.
[3] Stewart, quoted in Stegner, 69.
[4] Stewart, quoted in Robert S. Olpin, Dictionary of Utah Art (Salt Lake City: Salt Lake Art Center, 1980), 241.
[5] LeConte Stewart, Untitled document, LeConte Stewart Papers, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
