2025 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction4 / 24 • View Catalog •
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VERSO
Label, Maxwell Galleries, San Francisco, California
According to Dixon biographer Donald J. Hagerty, “During the late summer of 1927, a restless Dixon headed for Nevada’s northwest corner, initially planning only a two-week excursion, but the trip turned into four extraordinarily productive months. Out there he would cement the relationship between his art and Nevada’s basin and range geography, a uniquely spiritual place. These early twentieth-century forays established the foundation for the development of his art and served as a learning.
“Anxious to test his painting style, Dixon took a Southern Pacific train from San Francisco to Winnemucca where he met up with Frank Tobin, the son of noted stockman Clement Tobin. They then journeyed north into Humboldt County, exploring one long sagebrush valley after another, framed by mountain ranges stretching north to south to the faraway distance. Sometimes they traveled by automobile, but they mostly used horses to transport them and carry their gear.
“In his forays around this high desert country, Dixon made drawings and oil sketches of stark mountain ranges, lonely valleys, wild horses, abandoned opal mines, corrals, dry alkaline playas, and ranches tucked into small fertile valleys. The austere composition and strong horizontal lines of many of Dixon’s 1927 field sketches offer an impression that the landscape extends on forever beyond the frame as if the land flowed onto one edge and off the other and left a radiant imprint on the canvas by its passage.”
PROVENANCE
James G. Hamilton, Sausalito, California, ca. 1940
Present owners, by descent
EXHIBITED
Escape to Reality: The Western World of Maynard Dixon, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah, 2000-01
LITERATURE
Escape to Reality: The Western World of Maynard Dixon, Brigham Young University, 2001, p. 175, listed
