A man carries a bundle of sticks to a fire built on the bank of a river, to a speck of yellow that barely stands out against a darkening streak of sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A lone log cabin is seen from a distance that reveals the depth of its solitude; it is surrounded by several Sitka spruce fading into a forest, one that deepens into mountains so vast they range out of view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally, and most frequently, Mount McKinley rises from a swirling mist tinged with purple and blue, looming above the landscape, indifferent to the world below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The paintings of Sydney Laurence depict an Alaska where nature is big, and people are small.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat is a place where people are weak and insignificant, where landscapes are large and entirely invulnerable,\u201d said Kesler Woodward, Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and author of \u201cSydney Laurence, Painter of the North.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Woodward notes that Laurence, who came here at the turn of the last century and became, by the 1920s, a well-known artist in Anchorage and throughout the region, was the first professionally trained painter to make Alaska his longtime home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although his work is relatively unknown outside of the Pacific Northwest, the scenes Laurence created can be hard to miss in Alaska; his paintings, and reproductions of those works can be found in museums, in the lobbies of banks and hospitals, and in galleries, gift shops and drugstores throughout the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBecause he was such a skilled painter and brought his training and skills to landscapes, his vision dominated not only that of other artists, but of almost everyone who saw his work,\u201d said Woodward, who spoke about Laurence at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum last Wednesday,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Addison Field, Curator of Collections and Exhibits at the city museum, agrees that Laurence\u2019s influence has extended far beyond the realm of art, shaping our perceptions of the Alaska landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHis views documented our history; they became Alaska to us,\u201d Field said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Challenging Laurence\u2019s vision<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nWoodward believes that certain themes found in Laurence\u2019s work might be worth a second look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe idea of the land being so much more powerful than people, of people not having any effect on the land, can be dangerous,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have learned that people can very much affect the landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Laurence\u2019s model is a stalwart standby for many regional artists, who emulate his romantic images of Alaska as an untamed frontier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAfter Laurence, all of us who make images of Alaska landscapes have to make a choice \u2014 either to follow his model, or find models of our own,\u201d Woodward said. \u201cBut I and many other contemporary artists are trying to look for other directions. There are as many different attitudes toward the land as there are people painting it. In my own work, I don\u2019t see this as a place to be conquered, or tamed, or in conflict with \u2014 I see it as a place we are privileged to live in, a place where we will always be visitors.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Christine Crooks, a member of the local artists\u2019 group Plein Rein Painters, acknowledged Laurence\u2019s lingering sway over how Alaska is portrayed, and his \u201cin-depth impact\u201d on our perceptions of Alaska.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThese days, we may see all the shows out there about Alaska and think, \u2018Oh, no, not another dogsled!\u2019\u201d Crooks said. \u201cIn Laurence\u2019s day, there just wasn\u2019t the level of examination of Alaska that there is now. He made the rest of the world aware of Alaska\u2019s beauty, its grandeur.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another side of Laurence<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/amycondra.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/199549.6724115-1.jpg\")
Courtesy of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, \u201cEarly Morning, Juneau, Alaska\u201d by Sydney Laurence<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nWhen the staff of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum learned that the Plein Rein Painters had asked Woodward to come to Juneau to teach a painting class, they asked if he would be available to give a lecture while he was in town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe were lucky enough to have him be in our public program,\u201d Field said. \u201cI think this is one of the most popular \u2014 it is certainly the biggest \u2014 lectures we have had in this facility.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Woodward said that at last week\u2019s talk he spoke more frankly about Laurence\u2019s life than he usually does \u2014 especially about those elements of the artist\u2019s life that aren\u2019t generally known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI talked about the real process of making a living as an artist, the price of success,\u201d said Woodward, adding that Laurence was, like other artists, making art that is collected, driven by a ready market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Laurence, who was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1865, studied in New York City and in St. Ives, England, before becoming an artist-correspondent for newspapers during the Spanish American War and the Boxer Rebellion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1903 he left a wife and two young sons in England and ventured to Alaska.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Laurence\u2019s family had remained largely unknown until 1990, when Woodward organized a retrospective of Laurence\u2019s work for the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA local TV station did a lot of research about Laurence\u2019s life, and dug that out,\u201d said Woodward. \u201cIt was a great surprise to everyone when we heard about this first family that hadn\u2019t been acknowledged, about a wife Laurence had never divorced even though he was remarried in 1928 to someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
North to Alaska<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nWhy did Laurence come to Alaska?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe said he came to Alaska as all the other suckers did \u2014 he was looking for gold!\u201d Woodward said. \u201cI think he just got wanderlust, he liked the sense of adventure. He probably didn\u2019t intend to stay, but like most of us who come for a year, he ended up living here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After filing a few mining claims, Laurence traveled throughout Alaska, painting scenes in places like Cordova, Valdez, and, eventually, a spot 10 miles south of Mount McKinley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe painted more pictures of Mount McKinley than anything else,\u201d said Woodward. \u201cHis first paintings of the mountain are in 1910 or 1911, then through the teens, the \u201920s, the \u201930s \u2014 it quits being about the landscape and more about the mountain as an iconic symbol of Alaska.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe other reason he painted it,\u201d Woodward added, \u201cwas that it was popular \u2014 he had standing orders for paintings of Mount McKinley, for places like (Belle Goldstein Simpson\u2019s) Nugget Shop in Juneau. He admitted he was sick of painting Mount McKinley, and was cranking them out, but he had to do it \u2014 it was a ready market.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That ready market hasn\u2019t gone away \u2014 the desire for Laurence\u2019s work is still strong, to the degree that his work has inspired copies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere are lots of fakes, misattributions, and just misunderstandings, ranging from outright forgeries, to paintings by other artists with his signature added, to (the most frequent) hand-tinted photographs of his paintings that were sold, near the end of his life, from him, and in much greater volume by Hewitt\u2019s Drug Store in Anchorage, Griffin\u2019s in Fairbanks, and Dedman\u2019s Photo in Skagway, beginning in the 1940s,\u201d Woodward said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThose weren\u2019t sold as anything other than what they are,\u201d he added, \u201cbut many people\u2026 show them to me, thinking they have a Laurence original.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Crooks said that as an artist, she was intrigued by the process used to duplicate Laurence\u2019s paintings, especially the hand-tinted photographs, and could understand the desire for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPeople snapped them up!\u201d she said, noting that such reproductions remain popular. \u201cI certainly couldn\u2019t afford an original Picasso, but it would be nice to get a print of one and hang it in my house.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Woodward, who used more than 100 slides to illustrate his lecture, also explained what to look for when assessing a piece of Laurence\u2019s artwork, such as which signature he used at various points in his life, and what kind of labels were affixed to the back of the paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPeople see his paintings, and it\u2019s nice to know what they\u2019re looking at, whether they\u2019re seeing real ones or reproductions,\u201d said Woodward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Does Woodward think that Laurence\u2019s work would have been different, if he hadn\u2019t had to follow the dictates of the marketplace?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI would have liked to have seen him make fewer paintings, and to make more varied ones, but the reality is that while he was turning out what he frankly referred to as potboilers, he was also taking time and making masterpieces,\u201d said Woodward. \u201cWhen he was focused, he was truly a remarkable painter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBeing able to make a living, provide for his wife, turn out images that have meant a lot to a lot of people,\u201d added Woodward, \u201cenabled him to make the significant number of masterpieces that he did.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The paintings of Sydney Laurence depict an Alaska where nature is big, and people are small. by Amy Condra This article was originally published in the Juneau Empire. A man carries a bundle of sticks to a fire built on the bank of a river, to a speck of yellow that barely stands out against… Continue reading Laurence’s Alaska: The ‘invulnerable’ landscapes of the painter of the North<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1258,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alaska","category-arts","category-juneau","category-sydney-laurence","post_format-post-format-gallery","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1251"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1264,"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251\/revisions\/1264"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amycondra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
When the staff of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum learned that the Plein Rein Painters had asked Woodward to come to Juneau to teach a painting class, they asked if he would be available to give a lecture while he was in town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe were lucky enough to have him be in our public program,\u201d Field said. \u201cI think this is one of the most popular \u2014 it is certainly the biggest \u2014 lectures we have had in this facility.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Woodward said that at last week\u2019s talk he spoke more frankly about Laurence\u2019s life than he usually does \u2014 especially about those elements of the artist\u2019s life that aren\u2019t generally known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI talked about the real process of making a living as an artist, the price of success,\u201d said Woodward, adding that Laurence was, like other artists, making art that is collected, driven by a ready market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Laurence, who was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1865, studied in New York City and in St. Ives, England, before becoming an artist-correspondent for newspapers during the Spanish American War and the Boxer Rebellion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1903 he left a wife and two young sons in England and ventured to Alaska.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Laurence\u2019s family had remained largely unknown until 1990, when Woodward organized a retrospective of Laurence\u2019s work for the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA local TV station did a lot of research about Laurence\u2019s life, and dug that out,\u201d said Woodward. \u201cIt was a great surprise to everyone when we heard about this first family that hadn\u2019t been acknowledged, about a wife Laurence had never divorced even though he was remarried in 1928 to someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n