Edgar Payne

(1883-1947)

Sierra Majesty 33 x 43in framed 43 x 53in

Footnotes

Provenance
with George Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood, California.
Private collection, Pasadena, California.

Sierra Majesty is a quintessential example of Edgar Payne's intent to capture and preserve California's pure and wild beauty in his landscape paintings. "The Sierra scenes that [Payne] chose to depict were...an escape from industrialization, development, and a burgeoning population [in Southern California]. He portrayed not California's rapidly changing built environment but the unpopulated and untrammeled Eden of pure nature and wilderness...[Payne] depicted the highest locales with the clearest water, the most unblemished terrain, and the purest, most ultracrystalline light as if he were recording these settings for posterity." ¹

Between 1922 and 1924, Payne journeyed to Europe and completed a series of important seascapes and alpine scenes, which have been historically deemed the start of his mature work. Upon his return from Europe in 1924, Payne began a body of work for which he is widely celebrated, paintings of California's Eastern Sierras. Over a period of twenty years, Payne repeatedly found inspiration in the tranquil forests and awe-inspiring peaks of the High Sierras in many paintings, including Sierra Majesty.

Like the present work, many of Payne's compositions are devoid of people, as he purposely strove to portray the solitude of nature and the absence of man's presence. After experiencing development and the inescapable presence of man on the mountains in Europe, Payne turned to the Sierras as his subject with an urgent intent to experience the "feeling of communion with nature" there and to record the "pristine beauty" of the California mountains in his work. ²

While many of his fellow artists back in Los Angeles and Laguna Beach chose to paint closer to home, Payne was exhilarated by the mountains and the scenery he found. Along with his friend and painting companion Conrad Buff, Payne would often travel by Model T on dusty roads up to the Owens Valley. From there he would travel by horse or mule to remote locations in the high country. As these visits increased through the years, Payne chose to climb further and further into the mountains in order to seek out the most spectacular vantage points he and his party could find. Unlike many artists that only painted field sketches, with more finished paintings to be completed in their studio later, Payne dragged canvases of all sizes to the very spots at which these paintings were spontaneous sketched out and completed.

Intentionally avoiding "overused" Northern California subjects such as Yosemite Valley, Payne "sought 'new' settings in the Southland that were dramatic and big, bringing greater attention to less explored natural glories." ³ The Eastern Sierra environs, unique in America for their abundance of mountains and glaciers populating the landscape, and most with idyllic lakes filled with glacial runoff beneath them, were a perfect subject for Payne. These snow-clad Sierra mountains and emerald blue glacial lakes became the artist's trademark and thrust him into the international spotlight as he chose to exhibit these works in major American and European art centers. The sublime and pristine Sierra landscapes were perceived by the viewing public as almost otherworldly wonders that were unlikely to be witnessed firsthand.

Painted on a bright, sunlit day, Sierra Majesty features blue skies punctuated with fluffy white clouds above a sweeping mountainscape. Payne confidently captures the dramatic light and shadow caused by the rough mountainsides and craggy peaks and valleys. Broad brushstrokes of color interplay between the brown and pink sundrenched exposed rock faces, and the purple-ish blue tones of the shadowed facets. A typical high-country lake formed at the base of the peaks is tinted brilliant turquoise due to 'glacial flour' runoff. At the foreground, scrubby trees and rocks are bathed in full sunlight, the verdant palette nodding to the likely Spring season.

Although Payne painted numerous mountains in the Sierras, from multiple points of view, each painting manages to hold its own unique perspective of this locale. The grand scale of Sierra Majesty makes one feel that they could virtually step into the scene, as if standing by a window to nature.

¹ S.A. Shields and P. Trenton, Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey, Petaluma, California, 2012, pp. 73, 77.
² Ibid., p. 73.
² Ibid., p. 71.