According to Dixon biographer Donald J. Hagerty, “By the early 1940’s, Maynard Dixon had achieved considerable acclaim as one of the West’s leading artists. His long, productive life was a work of art in its own right. From the beginning Maynard Dixon was different, an authentic, iconoclastic, self-created individual. Born in Fresno, California, he had no formal academic art training except for three miserable months at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in early 1893, and he did not, as so many American artists would, make an obligatory pilgrimage to Paris for study. He was an active, outspoken, if sometimes ambivalent participant in California’s cultural life. Disdainful and bothered, yet intrigued and involved by the self-absorbed onslaught of modernism in the art work, he developed by the 1920’s two enduring themes: the timeless truth of the immense western landscape and the religious mysticism of the Native American.

“Dixon discovered a difference between the frontier and the West. The frontier, an historical concept concerned with certain American values, had all but disappeared, while the West itself seemed timeless, impervious to change, even spiritual. Ultimately he would conclude the West’s landscapes held the answers to his searching, arguing that American painting could best work its influence on the lives and thoughts of people when painters based their work upon native material and their native reaction to it. Maynard Dixon was a regionalist long before the term arrived, with a confirmed belief in the vitality of regional America. His region was the arid terrain of southern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.”

PROVENANCE
John Howell Books, San Francisco, CA
Private Collection, TX 1972
[The Coeur d’Alene Art Auction 2004, Lot 140]
Private Collection
[Sotheby’s, New York, May 23, 2007, Lot 184]
Private Collection

EXHIBITED
John Howell Books, San Francisco, CA, 1969-70

LITERATURE
Wesely M. Burnside, Maynard Dixon: Artist of the West (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1974), p 157
Donald J. Hagerty, The Art of Maynard Dixon (Layton, UT: 2010), pp 42-44, illustrated