The Crocker Art Museum Opens “Edgar Payne ~ The Scenic Journey”

Written by Martin Copperfield Sunday, 12 February 2012 01:13

Sacramento, California.- The Crocker Art Museum is proud to present a career-spanning retrospective of the work of Edgar Payne (1883–1947), one of the most gifted of California’s early plein-air artists, in the exhibition “Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey.” This exhibition features nearly 100 paintings and drawings, as well as photographs and objects from the artist’s studio. The exhibition will be on view at the Crocker from February 11th through May 6th before traveling to additional venues in Pasadena, California and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Payne utilized the animated brushwork, vibrant palette, and shimmering light of Impressionism, but his powerful imagery was unique among artists of his generation. While his contemporaries favored a quieter, more idyllic representation of the natural landscape, Payne was devoted to subjects of rugged beauty. His majestic, vital landscapes are informed by his reverence for the natural world.

This exhibition traces Payne’s artistic development as he traveled the world in search of magnificent settings: the Southern and Central California coast, the Sierra, the Swiss Alps, the harbors and waterways of France and Italy, and the desert Southwest. “In the course of his painting expeditions, Payne was determined to rediscover a broad and epic landscape that captured and conveyed the ‘unspeakably sublime,’” said Scott A. Shields, Ph.D., the exhibition’s curator and associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum. “In each locale, he sought vitality, bigness, nobility, and grandeur, which he turned into unified, carefully calculated compositions with brushwork that seemed to pulsate with life.” Born in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri in 1883, Payne began his art career by painting signs, stage sets, and murals. He considered himself completely self-taught—his training lasted only two weeks at the Chicago Art Institute—and believed that nature was his best teacher. Payne ultimately settled in California and from there travelled widely. He exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, was commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad to create paintings of the Southwest, won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon, and became a founding member of the Laguna Beach Art Association.


On May 6, 1885, Margaret E. Crocker presented the Crocker art gallery building, the grounds, and the E. B. Crocker Collection "in trust for the public" to the public-private partnership of the City of Sacramento and the California Museum Association (now the Crocker Art Museum Association). In doing so, she established a precedent-setting structure of a public-private partnership to over see the Museum and its collection. The Crocker's permanent collection includes more than 15,000 works of art, boasting one of the most comprehensive collections of California art from statehood to present, a world-renowned collection of Master Drawings, and one of the nation's premier collections of International Ceramics. The permanent collection also includes a growing collection of Asian, African and Oceanic art. From the Gold Rush to the present, this collection is as varied and interesting as the state itself. The collection of Californian art was initially assembled by Judge E.B. and Margaret Crocker in the early 1870s and now, more than a century later, has continued to remain contemporary. The Museum now boasts 150 years of painting, sculpture, and craft media covering genres that include Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art, and features artists such as Thomas Hill, Guy Rose, Joan Brown and Wayne Thiebaud. Among the highlights are Charles Christian Nahl's "Sunday Morning in the Mines", Thomas Hill's "Great Canyon of the Sierra, Yosemite", and William Hahn's "Market Scene, Sansome Street, San Francisco". Works by Albert Bierstadt, Samuel Marsden Brookes, A.D.O. Browere, and William Keith are among other landscapes, genre scenes, and still lifes that help document both California 's history and its importance as a leading art center. Building on the Crockers' core collection, the Museum has since added important examples by late 19th and early 20th century Californians, including signature works by Giuseppe Cadenasso, Dong Kingman, Xavier Martinez, M. Evelyn McCormick, Mary Curtis Richardson and Theodore Wores. The Crocker's collection of 285 Central European works boasts strengths in history painting, literary narrative, and genre scenes, in addition to 90 rare 19th-century miniatures. Among the artists represented are Johann Michael Rottmayer, Johann Christian Klengel, Johann Evangelist Holzer, Andreas and Oswald Achenbach, Theobald von Oir, Adolf Wichmann and Bernhard Reinhold. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.crockerartmuseum.org

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