Provenance:

Nugget Shop, Juneau, Alaska

Note:

Sydney Laurence was the first professionally trained artist to make Alaska his home. He was born in New York and studied at the Art Students League before moving to St. Ives, Cornwall, England in 1889. Over the next decade he exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists and was included in the Paris Salon in 1890,1894 and 1895. For reasons unknown, he moved to Alaska in 1904 and lived the life of a pioneer prospector. He painted little in his first years in the territory but between 1911 and 1914 he began to refocus on his art. He moved from Valdez to Anchorage in 1915. He painted a wide variety of Alaskan scenes during his career but it is the image of Mt. McKinley from the hills above the rapids of the Tokositna River that became his trademark. It is this image more than any other which personifies Laurence for his many admirers and collectors in Alaska and beyond. Laurence forged a uniquely personal style by applying the tonalist techniques he had learned in New York and Europe to the wilderness of the North. He, more than any other artist, defined for Alaskans and others the image of Alaska as “The Last Frontier.”