Old Tree

Additional Information

By 1943, Maynard Dixon had left his fabled home and studio in San Francisco to take up residence in Tucson, Arizona, where the drier air would be of benefit to his emphysema damaged lungs. He and his wife, painter Edith Hamlin, moved in next to the Ronstadt family, one of whom, Bill Ronstadt, owned a gallery in the city that represented both Maynard and Edith. Despite his failing health, Dixon never stopped drawing, painting, writing and telling stories. Dated, “Dec. 1943,” Cottonwood in Shadow, Old Tree has an autobiographical feel, as if the old artist and the old tree were simpatico, had some sort of shared, secret understanding about longevity, about the beauty each had witnessed in the desert, about how the form of the tree, like the form of the painting, express that witnessing, and tell the same soft-spoken story. This cottonwood, this old tree, brown and gnarled, yet still reaching out and up, beyond the edge of the canvas, stands in contradistinction to the full, round, yellow cottonwoods in the distance, enjoying their young time in the warm sun.

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Please note that the first unframed photo is most accurate for color. Framed photographs are to show the frame and are not color corrected to the painting.

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