Unknown Artist
1883-1947
Alpine Lake
MEDIUM: Oil on canvas
DIMENSIONS: 28 x 34 inches
Signed lower left
SOLD FOR: $64,350
Including Buyers Premium
2017,
LOT 440
Additional Information
Edgar Payne’s loose realism, a style he developed early in his career, is well suited to painting the planar rocks and crags in works such as Alpine Lake. Brushstrokes that combine flat areas and edges of impasto replicate the smooths and roughs in the mountains, and the artist’s unerring sense of color and shade layers light over the contours of the scene. At 14, Edgar Payne knew that he wanted to be an artist. When his father disapproved, he left home, working his way to Chicago as a house, sign, and theatrical scene painter. He did receive some training in Chicago and he did enjoy some success there, but an enthralling visit to California’s Pacific coastline and the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1909 set him on a course that would become a career. Three years later, Payne and his wife Elsie would settle in Laguna Beach and California landscapes would provide subjects for a lifetime of paintings.