Frank Tenney Johnson

(1874-1939)

Mountain Meadows 40 1/8 x 50 1/8 in. (101.9 x 127.3 cm.)

Footnotes

Provenance
The Biltmore Salon, Los Angeles, by 1931.
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Private Collection, Wyoming, 1996.
Sale, Santa Fe Art Auctions, Santa Fe, December 3, 2016, lot 345.
Private collection, acquired at the above sale.
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

Exhibited
New York, The National Academy of Design, Winter Exhibition, November 12-December 1, 1929, p. 19, no. 14.
Fort Worth Museum of Art, one man exhibition, March 1930, and elsewhere.
Los Angeles, Twenty-Third Annual California Art Club, November 18-December 31, 1932.
Cody, Wyoming, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, extended loan for public exhibition, 1997–2007.
Santa Fe, Gerald Peters Gallery, Frank Tenney Johnson and the American West, October 6–November 17, 2000, pp. 76-77, pl. 20, illustrated.

Literature
E.C. Maxwell, "The Western Background of F. Tenney Johnson," California Graphic, October 15, 1930, p. 6, illustrated.
E.C. Maxwell, "When Romance Rides: The Art of F. Tenney Johnson, A.N.A." Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, California, December 1931, vol. 89, no. 12, p. 18, illustrated. (as Mountain Meadow)
P.H. Falk, A.A. Bien, eds., The Annual Exhibition Record of the National Academy of Design: 1901-1950, Madison, Connecticut, 1990, p. 289, no. 14.
M. Webster, Frank Tenney Johnson: And the American West, Santa Fe, 2011, pp. 76-77, illustrated.

We wish to thank Melissa Webster Speidel for her kind assistance in cataloging this lot. This painting is included in the catalogue raisonné database Melissa Webster Speidel is compiling of the artist's oil paintings.

While Frank Tenney Johnson is best celebrated for his starlit nocturnes of cowboys at rest, perhaps more important to his oeuvre is the daytime scene, Mountain Meadows. Together with Charles Russell (1864-1926) and Frederic Remington (1861-1909), these artists captured an era of prairie schooners traveling across grassy plains, dusty cattle ranches, and wild untamed broncos. Johnson's biographer Harold McCracken notes, "There is nothing in our history that is more dramatically colorful or more purely American than that story."¹ Of the trio however, Johnson was the only one who would go on to achieve the highest honor in American Art - membership as a National Academician. Painted the same year Frank Tenney Johnson was elected an Associate National Academician, Mountain Meadows is a seminal work that brought him one step closer to full membership.

In 1918 Frank Tenney Johnson began exhibiting at the conservative but prestigious National Academy of Design. With the exception of 1921, he would continue to exhibit there annually until his death in 1939. Much like the Paris Salon or the Royal Academy in London, the National Academy of Design was a forum for artists to showcase their best work. While anyone was eligible to submit works to a jury for consideration in the annual exhibition, only those artists who were elected members of the Academy had the added distinction of including the suffixes ANA (Associate National Academician) and NA (National Academician) to their signatures. These two and three letter initials served as a status symbol that signaled an artist was worthy of recognition in the canon of American Art. It was a feat that would be even more impressive for Johnson to achieve since "Western subjects and cowboys in particular were not in good favor with the National Academy."²

Johnson's journey to the Academy began at age fourteen when his family moved from their Iowa farm near the Overland Trail to Milwaukee. In a big city for the first time, he was inspired by visits to the Layton Art Gallery, Milwaukee's first public art museum, and resolved to become an artist. As a self-motivated and enterprising young man, he dropped out of school to apprentice under two German expatriate artists who shaped his work in different ways. From Friedrich Wilhelm Heine (1845-1921), he gained a strong technical background and exposure to commercial art-making, and from Richard Lorenz (1858-1915), he found a champion of Western subjects and a kindred spirit. He went on to New York City pursuing additional training at the Art Students League under John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902) then under National Academicians Robert Henri (1865-1929) and William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). Beyond apprenticeships though, it was a 1903 commission with Field & Stream magazine that enabled him to travel extensively throughout Colorado where he found the heroic cowboy archetype that would inspire his work for nearly four decades.

Measuring a grand 40 by 50 inches Mountain Meadows follows the same composition as a similar but smaller work, Colorado Forest Ranger (Figge Art Museum, Iowa, 50.0876). In each version, a cross-legged ranger pauses for a cigarette break in a grassy clearing framed by boulders and fallen timber. Billowing clouds begin to form over the range, interrupting an otherwise bluebird day. As the inclement weather approaches the rocky peak begins to cast long shadows onto the glassy lake in the middle distance. While sitter and steed gaze in opposite directions, each blissfully unaware of the changing conditions, they are united by the thin strip of brown pigment making up the slack leather reins. Johnson further unites the figural vignettes by matching the cream coloring of the ranger's crisp shirt with his horse's coat. Subtle differences in brushwork however distinguish the two works. In Mountain Meadows the ranger has more pronounced smile lines, a sheen on his upper cheek bone and freshly starched collar. Rather than having a series of preparatory studies that developed these more finished details, Melissa Speidel argues the smaller version may have been completed to capitalize on the success of the present lot.³

Mountain Meadows continued to be shown beyond the National Academy with its inclusion in a 1930 one-man exhibition that toured the Fort Worth Museum of Art and Dallas's Highland Park Society of Arts. When Johnson was finally bestowed with full Academy membership near the end of his life, a lengthy article was published in the Los Angeles Herald Express: 'F. Tenney Johnson, will now have the right to use 'N.A.' after his name, for this well-known artist has received the coveted honor of full membership in the National Academy the highest honor awarded to an American artist... The membership is limited to 125 artists for the entire country.'⁴ With both institutional provenance and National Academy exhibition history, Frank Tenney Johnson's Mountain Meadows is a celebration of the Frontier that has continued to secure Western Art's place within the greater framework of American Art for years to come.

¹H. McCracken, The Frank Tenney Johnson Book: A Master Painter of The Old West, New York, 1974, p. 9.
²ibid p. 30
³M. Webster, Frank Tenney Johnson and the American West, Santa Fe, 2000, p. 76.
⁴H. McCracken, p. 190.