2025 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction16 / 24 • View Catalog •
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VERSO
Label, Garzoli Gallery, San Rafael, California
According to Payne biographer Scott A. Shields, “The most inaccessible locales still required Payne to leave his automobile behind and travel with pack animals on what writer Edwin Markham described as ‘dim trails difficult even for a patient mule.’ Although finding these obscure trails and climbing to high altitudes could certainly be dangerous, it was also exhilarating.
“As Payne’s landscape painting progressed, he came to believe that the higher and more remote the locale the better. His favorite setting was the Big Pine Lakes region, which included some of the Sierra’s most towering and rugged slopes. Although the preference among Impressionists internationally was for domesticated landscapes over wilderness and for visual sensation over religious message, this was not the case for Payne and several of his Southern California colleagues, including Wendt, Braun, and Hanson Puthuff, each of whom recognized and depicted the divine presence of the Creator in the mountains. Payne loved the outdoors and was determined to rediscover a broad and epic landscape that captured and conveyed what he called the ‘unspeakably sublime.’ In so doing, he, more than any other California artist of his era, made an extended study of the lakes, cascades, crags, cliffs, and glaciers of the eastern Sierra. Frederick Miner described such places, where one might ‘climb to the heights of a new Olympus, and get close to the stars,’ as the ‘Land of Heart’s’.”
PROVENANCE
Estate of Mr. and Mrs. Forrest Shaklee, San Leandro, California
Garzoli Gallery, San Rafael, California, 1998
Private collection, Wyoming
EXHIBITED
Twenty-Fifth Annual Exhibition of Works by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1921
LITERATURE
Scott A. Shields and Patricia Trenton, Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey, Pomegranate Communications, 2012, pp. 18, 74, 235, illustrated
