397 Old Tree

SOLD
Winning Bid Undisclosed
This item SOLD at 2017 Apr 08 @ 15:54UTC-7 : PDT/MST
Category Art
Auction Currency USD
Start Price NA
Estimated at 25,000.00 - 50,000.00 USD
Old Tree
Artist: Dixon, MaynardDate of Birth: 1875-1946
Medium: Oil on board
Dimensions: 12 x 16 inches
Signed: Signed lower left and inscribed "Ariz. Dec 1943"
Verso:

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.