MAYNARD DIXON, The Prairie

The Prairie’s vast sky, low horizon and particularly large scale, give the composition an enormous sense of the West’s wide open spaces. Wesley Burnside notes that this view is of the San Joaquin plains, where Dixon resided outside of Fresno, California. In recalling his early memories of San Joaquin in the 1870s and 1880s, “Dixon felt he had been indelibly impressed with the ‘wide treeless plains, the great horizontal; the long line in landscape and people’” (Wesley Burnside, Maynard Dixon: Artist of the West, Provo, Utah, 1974, p. 15).

Devoted to western subjects, Dixon’s paintings are the arid terrains of southern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. To Dixon, the West was timeless, impervious to change, and even spiritual. Throughout his life Dixon “roamed the West’s plains, mesas, and deserts by foot, horseback, buckboard, drawing, painting, and expressing his creative personality in poems, essays and letters, searching for a transcendent awareness of the region’s spirit” (Donald J. Hagerty, The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon, Layton, Utah, 1993, p. xxv).

Ansel Adams once commented “[Maynard Dixon], like few I have known, appreciated the whole of the land, as well as its parts and their interrelationships. For him, the West was uncrowded, unlittered, unorganized and above all, vital and free. The horizons were sufficiently distant to inspire dreams and desires, and provided more than enough space to promise fulfillment.”