Edgar Payne

(1883-1947)

Canyon Walls 25 x 30in framed 34 x 39in

Footnotes

Provenance
William A. Karges Fine Art, Carmel, California.
The John Janneck Collection, Beverly Hills, California.

Navajo figures riding through the grand cliffside edifices of Canyon de Chelly, such as in the present painting Canyon Walls, are iconic and important subjects for California plein air artist Edgar Payne. Largely self-taught with a brief and unhappy stint at the Art Institute of Chicago, Payne was a successful mural artist and painter in Chicago and was a member of the Chicago Society of Artists and the Palette and Chisel Club. A lifelong and insatiable desire to travel and experience new places and to discover new subject matter led Payne to extensively explore the Western states, Canada and Europe. A 1916 commission from the Santa Fe Railroad brought Payne to the Southwest for the first time. There he visited the Grand Canyon, Canyon de Chelly and Northern New Mexico, developing a new color palette to match the light and earth of the region. Along with the Sierra Mountains, the subject of Edgar Payne's best-known work, the Southwest would be a region of continued interest for Payne into the 1930s and 1940s.

As indicated by the painting's title, the enormity of the geologic cliff formations is the central compositional focus of Canyon Walls, along with Payne's exploration of the effects of sunlight and shadow on the rockfaces. As Peter H. Hassrick writes in Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey, the artist was drawn to depictions of scale and color: "So combined, his attraction to grand scale or 'bigness', and his devotion to 'beauty', or what color and light can do to visually enhance mass, exposed his artistic strategy." ¹ In addition, Payne's desire to work independently, preferably in remote, unexplored locations, led him to the Navajo lands, rather than focusing on the more obvious Taos Pueblo peoples like many of his Chicago contemporaries did including Walter Ufer, Victor Higgins and Ernest Martin Hennings. ²

Canyon Walls' perspective is from the elevation of the dry riverbed, as low a spot as possible to draw the viewers eyes upwards. The sunbaked red rock walls are painted in bright salmon highlights on the right side of the composition and in a small section at the base of the left walls. That sundrenched palette contrasts dramatically with the cool blue and purple shadowed rock walls on the left and in the recesses at the center. Payne articulates the faceted and creviced rockfaces with shadowed hues and sets the spectacular topography against a deep cerulean blue, almost cloudless, sky.

Three diminutive Navajo riders emerge out of the narrow canyon in the lower center, further emphasizing the immense scale. As Hassrick observes in other paintings of the area, Payne uses the Navajo as compositional devices to counterbalance the prominent geology of the canyon. ³ The sheer grandeur of the canyon would have been nearly impossible for contemporary viewers to comprehend without the inclusion of the figures. They play a critical role in understanding and appreciating nature's magnificent architecture. While emphasizing the seemingly infinite and otherworldly landscape of the American west, Payne's work also serves as a thoughtful and genuine depiction of the Navajo in their natural setting, a frontier the artist knew was rapidly vanishing.

¹ S.A. Shields, P. Trenton, Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey, Petaluma, California, 2012, p. 182.
² Ibid., p. 183.
³ Ibid., p. 193.