Sentinel Rock YoSemite

 

James David Smillie

  1833 - 1909 (biography)

1871  

oil on gessoed paper 

16 1/4 x 13 1/4" image 

unsigned 

 

in pigment in lower right: Sentinel Rock - / YoSemite Aug '71; labels on verso of protective board from the Fresno Arts Center and Palm Spring Desert Museum 

 

 

 

 

BC228 

SOLD

This painting was exhibited in "Views of Yosemite" at the Fresno Arts Center in 1982 and "California's Western Heritage" at the Palm Springs Desert Museum in 1986. James D. Smillie visited Yosemite with his brother George in 1871 during the summer months of June through September. James wrote the following in the Yosemite section of Picturesque America, recording his responses to the landscape: Great cliffs have fallen, and avalanches of rock have ploughed their way down the slope to the bottom of the valley. While climbing in such surroundings, the wreck of some world is suggested, so vast the ruin and so pigmy the climber. No words can convey other than a feeble impression of the effects of mountains of granite, sharp and fresh in fracture, piled one upon the other, the torn fragments of a forest underneath, or strewed about, as though the greatest had been but as straws tossed in the wind. A broad track of desolation leads away up to the heights from which these rocks have been thrown.