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Lot 80
William Wendt(1865-1946)Summer Thaw 40 x 50in overall: 52 x 62in
19 November 2018, 18:00 PST
Los AngelesSold for US$137,500 inc. premium
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William Wendt (1865-1946)
Summer Thaw
signed and dated 'William Wendt 1913' (lower right)
oil on canvas
40 x 50in
overall: 52 x 62in
Painted in 1913
signed and dated 'William Wendt 1913' (lower right)
oil on canvas
40 x 50in
overall: 52 x 62in
Painted in 1913
Footnotes
Provenance
Sale, Christie's, Los Angeles, California, Western & American Paintings, April 29, 1999, sale 9096, lot 47.
with Edenhurst Gallery Fine Art, Los Angeles, California.
with William A. Karges Fine Art, Santa Monica, California.
Private collection, Las Vegas, Nevada.
William Wendt visited the West coast as early as 1894, but traveled extensively throughout both coasts and Europe, with Chicago as his home base until he established residency in Los Angeles in 1906.1 While he and his artist wife Julia Bracken Wendt continued to participate in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago over the next few years, they became firmly established in the Los Angeles plein air scene. They were original members of the California Art Club in 1910. Wendt was a loyal supporter of the CAC, exhibiting almost every year between 1910-1938 and serving as president for the years of 1911-1914, 1917, and 1918.2
In 1913, Wendt embarked on two painting trips, one of which eventually led him to Washington state. There he spent the summer painting snow-capped views of Mt. Rainier, and other nearby mountains, which he showed nationally.3
In a review of one of the shows, Antony Anderson described Wendt's 'notable pictures' as 'large, serious, deliberate, carefully thought out from start to finish. The result is quiet massiveness, the brooding bigness of nature in skies, hills, and mountains. And his technique has the sureness which comes from thought and knowledge...he may be called a painter's painter.'4
William Wendt's landscapes reveal as much about the grandeur of the West as the artist's own religious beliefs. Wendt believed in the theory of intelligent design and believed that God's creative purpose for the Earth is as evident in the natural world as in scripture. Summer Thaw, with its bright, broad and lively brushwork, emphasizes the contrast between the immortality of the landscape and the mortality of its creator. The juxtaposition of these two truths, both of which Wendt deeply believed, appear frequently throughout his landscape compositions: 'A man who can compose so surely and strongly has to know where he stands in relation to life, he must see the world as a moral creation, a thing of inevitable laws and definite structures.' 5
Summer Thaw exemplifies the artist's ability to capture the magnificence and the vastness of the great western landscape, especially in such a large canvas. As the composition gradually leads the eye across snowfields and off into the distance, the artist is directing the viewer's eye to the vastness of the heavens, the very source of his inspiration. He seldom depicted figures in his landscapes, instead focusing on capturing the dignity and spirituality he saw as inherent to the landscape.
1 Janet Blake, Will South, and Jean Stern, In Nature's Temple: The Life and Art of William Wendt, Irvine: The Irvine Museum, 2008, p. 233, 239.
2 Ibid, p. 242, 243.
3 Ibid, p. 246, 247.
4 Antony Anderson, "Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1914, p. III4.
5 Arthur Millier, "Of Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1926, n.p.).
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