Oct 02, 2012 - Sale 2287

Sale 2287 - Lot 2

Price Realized: $ 5,040
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
ORIGINAL PAINTING FROM THE HARRIMAN ALASKA EXPEDITION (ALASKA.) Dellenbaugh, Frederick S.; artist. [Mt. Fairweather from the Northwest.] Oil painting on canvas, 8 1/4 x 15 3/4 inches to sight, in original wood frame; signed "F S Dellenbaugh" in lower left and inscribed "FSD July 24 1899" into the wet paint in lower right, faintly inscribed in pencil on frame verso "Mt. Fairweather and the Fairweather Range from the deck of the George W. Elder 1899." Alaska, 24 July 1899
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This striking view was painted as part of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, sponsored and led by railroad millionaire Edward Henry Harriman, with John Muir, Edward Curtis, and John Burroughs aboard. The painter Frederick Dellenbaugh (1853-1935) was an accomplished wilderness artist in his own right.
Mount Fairweather straddles the boundary between British Columbia and the Alaska panhandle, and though only a few miles from the ocean, it is the highest point in British Columbia at 15,300 feet. This painting was lithographed for the published expedition report, where it appears opposite page 118. The naturalist John Burroughs described the day this painting was created in his journal: "On the 24th we steamed all day off the Fairweather Range, which lay there before us without a cloud or film to dim its naked majesty. We were two or three hours in passing the great peak itself. Piled with snow and beaten upon by a cloudless sun, its reflected light shone in my stateroom like that of an enormous full moon. This was a day of blue and white--blue of the sea and sky and white of the mountains--long to be remembered but not to be described"--Harriman Alaska Expedition, page I:115.