Mt. McKinley

Additional Information

Provenance:
The artist, ca. 1921
Private Collection, Alaska
By descent in the family to the grandchildren
Susan & Richard Combs
Private collection, Montana
Scottsdale Art Auction, Scottsdale, AZ, 2016

Sometime after 1900, Brooklyn-born painter Sydney Laurence decided, seemingly without provocation of any kind and under mysterious circumstances, to abandon his wife and two children in England, where he had been studying art. By 1903, another mysterious set of circumstances led him to Alaska, where he became a miner and continued to paint. His mining gig showed little signs of success, but his painting soared, particularly his work of Mt. McKinley, which he painted in hundreds of works. Many of the paintings showed the mountain covered in thin clouds at its base and often included objects in the foreground—trees, food caches in wood towers, totem poles and fire lookouts—that helped frame the epic size and scale of the 20,300-foot mountain. He also painted other images around Alaska, though none as great in quality or quantity as Mt. McKinley.

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