Provenance: Private collection, Oakland, CA, 1936 By descent, Oakland, CA Private collection, Texas Exhibited: Ninth Annual State-Wide Exhibition, California, 1935 Twenty-Sixth Annual Exhibition, Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, Los Angeles, CA, 1935 New Year’s Eve Beaux-Arts Ball, California Art Club, 1935 Frank Tenney Johnson’s A Lone Rider is a classic example of the artist’s nocturne canyon paintings, a sub-genre that Johnson essentially invented in the early 20th century after a pivotal trip through Hayden, Colorado, in 1904. Broke and low on travel supplies, Johnson had to wire for more money to continue his journey. While he waited, he sketched and painted from morning and well into dusk. His letters home during this period reveal he was trying new techniques with moonlight, shadows and his palette. “I’ve been experimenting with colors, the way Maxfield Parrish gets his peculiar techniques,” he wrote, “It’s an attractive effect indeed and I’ll make good use of it.” Eleven days later, his money arrived and the journey continued, but Johnson would never truly escape from Hayden and the mysteries he unlocked there. He would carry them with him for the rest of his career. A Lone Rider, sometimes referred to as A Lone Rider Alhambra, was painted in 1935 when Johnson was living on Champion Place in Alhambra, California. Champion Place would come to be known as Artist’s Alley because of the many notable artists who called it home: Norman Rockwell, Victor Clyde Forsythe, Eli Harvey, Jack Wilkinson Smith and others.