“Nostalgia is part of my respect for what LeConte Stewart does. But the hard-mouthed integrity of the life-view is more important.  There is something in his best paintings that does not depend on nostalgia but upon recognition of a less parochial kind.” Wallace Stegner

“One of Utah’s most accomplished and beloved artists.” —Utah Museum of Fine Arts

Utah artist LeConte Stewart (1891–1990) created images of Utah and the West at once epic and intimate. His farms, deserts, and urban landscapes capture a region and an era. Influenced by John Carlson, Maynard Dixon, and Edward Hopper, Stewart is a valued and important voice in this period of American art. This long-awaited volume includes more than 300 paintings, many never before seen or brought together in one work.

Includes essays by Mary Muir, Donna Poulton, Robert Davis, James Poulton, and Vern Swanson. It also features an introduction by noted American art scholar, curator, and collector William Gerdts.

Mary Muir is one of the foremost authorities on LeConte Stewart and his work, and the author of LeConte Stewart: The Education of the Artist and the Artist- Educator.

Donna Poulton, Ph.D., is a curator of the art of Utah and the West at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.

Robert Davis is curator of art for the LDS Church History Museum in Salt Lake City.

James Poulton, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice in Salt Lake City.

Vern Swanson is director of the Springfield Museum of Art in Utah.

To purchase a copy of LeConte Stewart: Masterworks through My-West.com for $70 plus $5 shipping. (List price of the book is $75.) Just click on the PayPal button below.

From The Sense of Place, by Wallace Stegner (1992):

"Back to Wendell Berry, and his belief that if you don’t know where you are you don’t know who you are. He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is talking about the knowing that poets specialize in.

It is only a step from his pronouncement to another: that no place is a place until it has had a poet. 

No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we will call poetry. What Frost did for New Hampshire and Vermont, what Faulkner did for Mississippi and Steinbeck for the Salinas Valley, Wendell Berry is doing for his family corner of Kentucky, and hundreds of other place-loving people, gifted or not, are doing for places they were born in, or reared in, or have adopted and made their own…"        

Thomas Hart Benton, ca. 1937.

"Where does the West begin?

Strung in a zigzag pattern up and down the ninety-eight-degree line, there is a marked change of country which is observable wherever you journey westward, whether in the North, the middle country, or the South. About this line, though the exact distance from it is highly variable, the air becomes clearer, the sky bluer, and the world immensely bigger. There are great flat stretches of land in Louisiana, there are prairies in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, but the experienced traveler in the United States does not confuse these with the West. Even though these more eastern prairies may present the same great vistas which are connected in our thoughts with the West, they lack the character of infinitude which one gets past the ninety-eight-degree line.

In the prairie lands, coming between the old forest country of the Middle West and the plains, one is able at times to see for great distances, but it is as if one were set down in the center of a big plate with elevated edges. There are definite ends to the horizon, which acts as an enclosure and sets a limit to things. In the West proper there are no limits. The world goes on indefinitely. The horizon is not seen as the end of a scene. It carries you on beyond itself into farther and farther spaces. Even the tremendous obstructions of the Rocky Mountains do not affect the sense of infinite extension which comes over the traveler as he crosses the plains. Unless you are actually in a pocket or a canyon, the Rocky Mountains rise in such a way, tier behind tier, that they carry your vision on and on, so that the forward strain of the eyes is communicated to all the muscles of the body and you feel actually within yourself the boundlessness of the world. You feel that you can keep moving forever without coming to any end. this is the physical effect of the West.

There are many people for whom this effect is unbearable, especially as it is manifested on the great plains. Cozy-minded people for whom life's values reside in little knicknacks which must be kept within easy reach, people for whom the sense of intimacy is necessary for emotional security, hate the brute magnitude of the plains country. All their familiar urges are inhibited by the great empty stretches of land and sky, by the immensity which reduces even a city to an anthill. Time and again on motorbusses and trains I've heard people complain of the monotony, the weariness, the oppressiveness of the plains. I've heard them groan over the misery of their journey.

For me the great plains have a releasing effect. They make me want to run and shout at the top of my voice. I like their endlessness. I like the way they make human beings appear as the little bugs they really are. I like the way they make thought seem futile and ideas but the silly vapors of the physically disordered. To think out on the great plains, under the immense rolling skies and before the equally immense roll of the earth, becomes a presumptuous absurdity. Human effort is seen there in all its pitiful futility. The universe is unveiled there, stripped to dirt and air, to wind, dust, cloud and the white sun. The indifference of the physical world to all human effort stands revealed as hard inescapable fact."

An Artist In America, by Thomas Hart Benton       

 Thomas Hart Benton, ca. 1937.

Thomas Hart Benton, ca. 1937.

Credit: Utah Historical SocietyI come by my reading society bona fides honestly. I’m the proud member of two reading groups, both of which began in 1982. But that’s not all. Apparently, this obsession with reading is genetic. My great great aunt, if I can believe what my mother told me when I was a child, started the Schopenhauer Reading Society in Idaho Falls, Idaho in the 1880s or 1890s. My mother was proud of this aunt – proud that she’d been an intellectual in the early days of the state, and that she’d read books that didn’t make it on her religious community’s list of approved works. Even the title – the Schopenhauer Reading Society, named after the philosopher, professional curmudgeon and pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer – seemed to be a statement of my aunt’s independent spirit.

Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Credit: zvab.comI’ve asked through my family about this aunt, and no one knows anything about her. If she and the Schopenhauer Reading Society existed, they’re lost in the winds of time. But it got me wondering – how common were reading societies in the early West? And what was their purpose?

Here are a couple of examples.

Credit: Utah Historical SocietyIn Silvana, Washington, the Norsk Læse- og Samtaleforening (roughly the Norwegian Reading Society) was formed sometime around the mid 1800s. It was centered in the Norwegian Lutheran community, but its constitution could have been written by my iconoclastic aunt. “The society,” it said, “is not a religious society,” meaning they didn’t want the church telling them what to think or read. The purpose of the society was to promote the “profitable use of idle time” through “the purchase and reading of good books together with conversation.” In other words, as a group they bought books and passed them around among their members, so everyone could read them.

Miss Foster, faculty at Carlisle Indian School, full length, reclining in chair, reading a book, 1864. Credit: Library of CongressThis is one of the things I love about the history of the West. In the 1800s, the West was wild and wooly, as we all know. But a lot of people were also striving to use their minds as well as their muscles. A friend of mine told me once that a great great grandfather of his, who settled in Wyoming in the 1860s, paid big money to have philosophy books, written in German and French, brought to him on the Union Pacific train from New York.

Here’s another example:

Farm boy reading jokes as his part of the program at the literary society meeting. Pie Town, New Mexico. Credit: Library of Congress. Circa 1940In February 1874, two young men in Salt Lake City were feeling pessimistic about their hopes of finding true romance. One of them, Jim Ferguson, “had heard, no doubt, of fond couples ‘reading life’s meaning in each others eyes,’” and suggested that they form an association of readers. A short while later, the Wasatch Literary Society was born. It wasn’t that unusual – even at that early date. As the journal BYU Studies says, ‘the 1870s were ripe for cultural societies’ in the Intermountain West, and by 1874, the early Mormon settlers had already fostered many cultural societies, including the ‘Polysophical,’ the ‘Philomathian,’ and the ‘Universal Scientific’ societies, all devoted to expanding the cultural literacy of their members.

Homer Brown joined the Salt Lake Polysophical Society in December 1855. Credit: GatheringGardiners.Blogspot.comThe Wasatch Literary Society was relatively short-lived, and met its ignominious end in 1878. But while it was going, it drew some of the brightest lights of the young pioneers, and presumably Jim Ferguson and his friend finally found romance.

Emily Wells, early member of the Wasatch Reading Society. Credit: Growing Up Early in Utah

Credit: etsy.com

“He conveyed a straightforwardness and an honest, American handsomeness that seemed to both ignore and rise above the contrived glamour and studied posturing that had characterized so many other film heroes...No matter what costume he put on, he looked like he owned it. The camera loved him, and so did the box office.” – Gary Cooper: Enduring Style

 Enduring Style, by G. Bruce Boyer and Maria Cooper Janis
, Foreword by Ralph Lauren. Credit: abebooks.comGary Cooper spent the first two decades of his life working his father’s cattle ranch in Montana and failing at pretty much everything else he attempted, even being rejected by his college drama club before he dropped out of school.  Yet he somehow went from simple cowboy to enduring American legend, cultivating his unique brand of manliness, debonair and down to earth, suave without the slightest hint of arrogance.

Credit: answers.com“Coop” is widely regarded as the most popular film star of all time, and director Billy Wilder described his gift as “a love affair between performer and celluloid.”  But in this magnificent book it’s his fashion sense that’s on display…and again, the book puts it best:

“…he had devised and perfected his own debonair style that combined a perfectly tailored European wardrobe with all-American casual sportswear to produce the first, and still finest example of elegant, international, masculine style rooted in an American ideal of the everyman as hero. From the most casual sports clothing to the most formal white tie and tails, Cooper carried himself with uncontrived conviction.“

Credit: themusedeyeWe added a few of our favorite pictures:

Credit: superstock.co.uk

Credit: GaryCooperScrapbookCredit: docormacro

Willa Cather. Credit: Entertainment Realm

A Lost Lady is a novel with many themes, from the aggression at the root of relationships between men and women, to the value of illusions, to the rhythms of life that dictate that as some of us decline and weaken, others will grow strong and virile, and will take the places of the weak and departed. Set on the Western Plains, the book describes the lives of Captain and Mrs. Forrester. Captain Forrester is a retired railroad man who has made enough money to retire comfortably in Sweet Water, an area he first saw when he was young and vowed to return to because of its pristine beauty. His wife, 25 years his junior, is a beautiful and aristocratic woman who is bored, confused and disloyal to her husband. After his death, she leaves the Sweet Water estate in the hands of an exploitative and greedy man named Ivy Peters.

Credit: My-West.com ©

As in the Great Gatsby, to which A Lost Lady has been compared, events occurring on a human scale can also be interpreted as symbols of broad sweeps of history. The deterioration and death of Mr. Forrester and the decline of his estate can also be read as a tale of the transition of the West itself - from an age of romance and adventure and the pioneering spirit, to the age of selfishness and blindness to the beauty and meaning embedded in the landscape.

Here is Captain Forrester describing, to his dinner party guests, how he first discovered Sweet Water, and his philosophy of life and of the West:

[T]he Captain began his narrative: a concise account of how he came West a young boy, after serving in the Civil War, and took a job as driver for a freighting company that carried supplies across the plains from Nebraska City to Cherry Creek, as Denver was then called. The freighters, after embarking in that sea of grass six hundred miles in width, lost all count of the days of the week and the month. One day was like another, and all were glorious; good hunting, plenty of antelope and buffalo, boundless sunny sky, boundless plains of waving grass, long fresh-water lagoons yellow with lagoon flowers, where the bison in their periodic migrations stopped to drink and bathe and wallow.

George Catlin, Buffalo Bulls Fighting in Running Season – Upper Missouri, 1834-1839. Credit: ArtUnframed.com

"An ideal life for a young man," the Captain pronounced. Once, when he was driven out of the trail by a wash-out, he rode south on his horse to explore, and found an Indian encampment near the Sweet Water, on this very hill where his house now stood. He was, he said, "greatly taken with the location," and made up his mind that he would one day have a house there. He cut down a young willow tree and drove the stake into the ground to mark the spot where he wished to build. He went away and did not come back for many years; he was helping to lay the first railroad across the plains.

… "When things looked most discouraging," he went on, "I came back here once and bought the place from the railroad company. They took my note. I found my willow stake,--it had rooted and grown into a tree,--and I planted three more to mark the corners of my house. Twelve years later Mrs. Forrester came here with me, shortly after our marriage, and we built our house."

Mrs. Forrester nodded at him from her end of the table. "And now, tell us your philosophy of life,--this is where it comes in," she laughed teasingly.

… "Well, then, my philosophy is that what you think of and plan for day by day, in spite of yourself, so to speak--you will get. You will get it more or less. … [Y]ou will accomplish what you dream of most."

"And why? That`s the interesting part of it," his wife prompted him.

"Because," he roused himself from his abstraction and looked about at the company, "because a thing that is dreamed of in the way I mean, is already an accomplished fact. All our great West has been developed from such dreams; the homesteader`s and the prospector`s and the contractor`s. We dreamed the railroads across the mountains, just as I dreamed my place on the Sweet Water. All these things will be everyday facts to the coming generation, but to us--" Captain Forrester ended with a sort of grunt. Something forbidding had come into his voice, the lonely, defiant note that is so often heard in the voices of old Indians. - A Lost Lady, Part One, Chapter Four, 1923

Across the Continent, Currier & Ives. Credit: EasyArt.com

Credit: LiveAuctioneers.com

One of the greatest novels of all time about the American West, The Ox-Bow Incident was first published in 1940. It’s the story of two riders in the Old West, Art and Gil, who end up in the town of Bridger’s Wells. The people of the town are tense because of recent cattle rustling, and when they hear a rumor that a neighbor has been murdered and his cattle rustled, they form a lynch-mob to track down the culprits. They find three strangers and accuse them of the crime. Without a trial, the mob votes to hang the three. When they return to town, they find that their neighbor wasn’t murdered after all. The novel ends with Art and Gil agreeing to carry a letter one of the victims wrote to his wife on the night before he was hanged. Gil says, ‘I’ll be glad to get out of here.’ Art says, ‘Yeh.’

Gil (Henry Fonda) and Art (Harry Morgan) reflect on the night's events at the Ox-Bow (from The Ox-Bow Incident, 1943). Credit: poptheology.com

The story is told from Art’s perspective. Here is his description of the Ox-Bow valley, where the hanging was to take place:

The Ox-Bow was a little valley up in the heart of the range. Gil and I had stayed there a couple of days once, on the loose. It was maybe two or three miles long and half or three quarters of a mile wide. The peaks were stacked up on all sides of it, showing snow most of the summer. The creek in the middle of it wound back on itself like a snake trying to get started on loose sand, and that shape had named the valley. There was sloping meadow on both sides of the creek, and in the late spring millions of purple and gold violets grew three, violets with blossoms as big as the ball of a man’s thumb. Beyond the meadow, on each side, there was time to the tops of the hills. It was a lovely, chill, pine-smelling valley, as lonely as you could want. Scarcely anybody came there unless there was a dry season. Just once in a while, if you passed in the late summer, you’d see a sheepherder small out in the middle, with his burrow and dogs and flock. The rest of the time the place belonged to squirrels, chipmunks and mountain jays. They would all be lively in the edge of the wood, scolding and flirting. – The Ox-Bow Incident, p. 113

The Ox-Bow Incident was made into a movie in 1943, starring Henry Fonda, Harry Morgan, Dana Andrews and Anthony Quinn. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in that year.

Credit: doctormacro

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"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." - Jack London, speaking to a reporter, shortly before his death in 1916

Jack London on his ranch in Sonoma County in 1914. Credit: Wikipedia

The chronicler of the Yukon, the defender of the cultures of the South Seas and the keen observor of the American West, Jack London died on this day in 1916 of renal failure. Born in 1876, he was a mere 40 years old when he died. But he packed into those 40 years a life many couldn’t live in 100. The son of an unmarried mother (it’s rumored his father was a pioneer in American astrology, William Chaney, and that his mother attempted suicide when Chaney refused to marry her), London took his name from a man she married in his early childhood, John London.

In his adolescence, London worked a variety of hard labor jobs, including going on patrol to capture poachers, working in a cannery, pirating oysters in San Francisco bay, and sailing the Pacific on a sealing ship. In 1894, he became a hobo, and was jailed for 30 days in New York for vagrancy.

Jack London, showing how he traveled as a tramp. From his illustrated book, The Road. Credit: Library of Congress

He spent the winter of 1897 in the Yukon, trying to find his fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush (where he developed scurvy) – all of which gave him no end of material for his later writing. He began publishing in 1899.

Sheep Camp in the Klondike. Jack London is believed to be the young man in the group on the right, second from left. Credit: Skagwaynews.com

Between 1899 and his death in 1916, he produced over fifty volumes of stories, novels and political essays, including Call of the Wild, White Fang, Sea Wolf and Klondike Gold Rush. His writings made him one of the most popular and well-known figures of his day. He was among the first writers to work with the movie industry, and a number of his stories were made into films.  

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During his thirties, London developed kidney disease, possibly related to late stage alcoholism. He died on November 22, 1916 in the place to which he had devoted the latter part of his life – Beauty Ranch in Glen Ellen, California, on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain: ‘Next to my wife,’ he said, ‘the ranch is the dearest thing in the world to me. … I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.’

Jack London working at his Beauty Ranch, 4 days before his death. Credit: London.sonoma.edu

London was well known for his prolific production, his eye for detail, and his observations of the richness of human experience. He seemed to absorb all of the little things that, when written, give you the feeling of actually being in the scene. In the excerpt below, from one of his later books, Valley of the Moon, the main character Saxon, who just moved into a Bay area cottage with her new husband Billy, talks about her family history with her friends Mary and Bert:

"Our cattle were all played out," Saxon was saying, "and winter was so near that we couldn't dare try to cross the Great American Desert, so our train stopped in Salt Lake City that winter. The Mormons hadn't got bad yet, and they were good to us."

"You talk as though you were there," Bert commented.

"My mother was," Saxon answered proudly. "She was nine years old that winter."

They were seated around the table in the kitchen of the little Pine Street cottage, making a cold lunch of sandwiches, tamales, and bottled beer. It being Sunday, the four were free from work, and they had come early, to work harder than on any week day, washing walls and windows, scrubbing floors, laying carpets and linoleum, hanging curtains, setting up the stove, putting the kitchen utensils and dishes away, and placing the furniture.

"Go on with the story, Saxon," Mary begged. "I'm just dyin' to hear. And Bert, you just shut up and listen."

"Well, that winter was when Del Hancock showed up. He was Kentucky born, but he'd been in the West for years. He was a scout, like Kit Carson, and he knew him well. Many's a time Kit Carson and he slept under the same blankets. They were together to California and Oregon with General Fremont. Well, Del Hancock was passing on his way through Salt Lake, going I don't know where to raise a company of Rocky Mountain trappers to go after beaver some new place he knew about. Ha was a handsome man. He wore his hair long like in pictures, and had a silk sash around his waist he'd learned to wear in California from the Spanish, and two revolvers in his belt. Any woman 'd fall in love with him first sight. Well, he saw Sadie, who was my mother's oldest sister, and I guess she looked good to him, for he stopped right there in Salt Lake and didn't go a step. He was a great Indian fighter, too, and I heard my Aunt Villa say, when I was a little girl, that he had the blackest, brightest eyes, and that the way he looked was like an eagle. He'd fought duels, too, the way they did in those days, and he wasn't afraid of anything.

"Sadie was a beauty, and she flirted with him and drove him crazy. Maybe she wasn't sure of her own mind, I don't know. But I do know that she didn't give in as easy as I did to Billy. Finally, he couldn't stand it any more. Ha rode up that night on horseback, wild as could be. 'Sadie,' he said, 'if you don't promise to marry me to-morrow, I'll shoot myself to-night right back of the corral.' And he'd have done it, too, and Sadie knew it, and said she would. Didn't they make love fast in those days?" – Valley of the Moon, Book I, Chapter XIII

Jack London’s gravesite. Credit: London.sonoma.edu

Credit: abebooks.com

”He believed the dog was immortal,” is the opening line of the book Rin Tin Tin, The Life and the Legend written by Susan Orlean. The story begins when Corporal Lee Duncan found the pup in a bombed out kennel in France during World War One. He took him and his sister back to the unit and named them Rin Tin Tin and Nanette after the famous dolls the French children gave to soldiers for good luck. 

Nanette and Rin Tin Tin with Lee Duncan. Credit: Butterybooks.com

Like most people who own pets, Duncan thought this dog was special, but he couldn’t know how special. The dog was great at jumping and Duncan introduced him to Hollywood where he became an overnight sensation and never looked back.

Credit: USAToday

Making over 23 films, he was also the subject of books, radio programs and television and was mythologized as dying in the arms of Jean Harlow. 

Credit: Youtube

In the end it was not the tricks or the feats of power that made the dog a star, it was and remains the unwavering bond between humans and man's best friend that made him a household name and an icon of Hollywood history.

Lee Duncan and Rin Tin Tin. Credit: Youtube

Rin Tin Tin is kept alive through his progeny (now in the 11^th generation) and through Susan Orlean’s remarkable book. Here are some reviews:

Christian Science  Monitor:

"Although her initial interest was sparked by the memory of her childhood fascination with an eight-inch plastic Rin Tin Tin figurine her grandfather kept out of reach on his desk, Orlean’s book runs much deeper than Baby Boomer nostalgia. Rin Tin Tin, no shaggy dog story, is an eloquent, powerful inquiry into 'how we create heroes and what we want from them,' and about what endures in our culture. Orlean’s conclusion: 'something you truly love will never die.'

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Walter Isaacson:

"Rin Tin Tin was more than a dog. He embodied the core paradoxes of the American ideal: He was a loner who was also a faithful companion, a brave fighter who was also vulnerable. I was astonished to learn from this delightful book that he has existed for eleven generations over a century. By chronicling his amazing ups and downs, Susan Orlean has produced a hugely entertaining and unforgettable reading experience."

Credit: cbsnews.com

Ann Patchett

"Not only does Susan Orlean give us a fascinating and big-hearted account of all the many incar nations of Rin Tin Tin, she shows us the ever-changing role of American dogs in times of war and peace. This book is for anyone who has ever had a dog or loved a dog or watched a dog on television or thought their dog could be a movie star. In short— everyone."

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Credit: Youtube

Ivan Doig’s Dancing at the Rascal Fair follows the lives of two men, Angus McCaskill and Rob Barclay as they leave their homes in Scotland in 1889 to homestead as sheep ranchers near Gros Ventre, in Montana’s Two Medicine Country (an unidentified number of miles north of Helena). In this excerpt, Angus has toured his homestead, still marveling at its beauty. He twists himself in his saddle to look at all directions. Finally he looks west:

West. West, the mountains as steady as a sea wall. The most eminent of them in fact was one of the gray-rock palisades that lay like reefs in the surge of the Rockies, a straight up-and-down cliff perhaps the majority of a mile high and, what, three or more miles long. A stone partition between ground and sky, even-rimmed as though it had been built by hand, countless weathers ago. … Close as I was now to these promontories, which was still far, for the first time since Rob and I came to Gros Ventre these seemed to me local mountains. They were my guide now, even the wind fell from mind in their favor. Seeing them carving their canyons of stone into the sky edge, scarps and peaks deep up into the blue, a person could have no doubt where he was. The poor old rest of the earth could hold to whatever habit of axis it wished, but this Two Medicine country answered to a West Pole, its own magnetic world top here along its wildest horizon. - Dancing at the Rascal Fair, p. 74.

McCone County, Montana. Herder watching his sheep. Credit: Library of Congress

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