(Old Pine, near Glacier Point, Yosemite)

Chiura Obata

On 17 December 2017 Wilder Bentley wrote the following letter to the gallery about this Obata sumi-e painting:

Yes there is a story attached to this painting! The spring I graduated from Berkeley High WWII was over and travel became easier, so my father decided that he and I should go to Yosemite Valley and camp out for a couple of weeks, besides joining Mr. Obata and his wife where they always stayed in one particular spot in the campgrounds on the valley floor. In those days people slept on the ground, on a cushion of pine needles and under the stars, not in Winnebagos watching TV!

Mr. Obata always went there as soon as he could after school let out for the summer and his teaching obligations were over for the summer and he encouraged those of his pupils that were interested to join them and be sure and bring their painting gear and take advantage of the opportunity to make lots of studies in such a beautiful place.

In those days I believed in science and never painted. One day Obata and the advanced student who had a good car and was happy to drive Mr. Obata and his wife around set forth to go up to an overlook of the valley floor called Glacier Point, a thirty-mile drive, and Mr. Obata encouraged me to come with them. I think he saw something in me because I wasn't restless and when I had watched while he painted over the years since our family first knew his, I was absorbed in the process of his manner of painting (sumi-e) and wouldn't have thought of drifting off before it (the painting) was done. So off we went.

We stopped at a certain place near "Glacier Point" and Mr. Obata proceeded to crank this one out in on time. It is a tour de force of the genre, I can assure you.

Later we walked to the top of a place called Sentinel Dome which is a granite bulge of such a height that the view takes in everything, from Mt. Diablo a hundred miles west to the crest of the Sierras. The catch is finding such a day!

Now it happened that in those days there was an aged pine tree that grew out of a crack in the rocks at the very top of Sentinel Dome and this tree was very picturesque so that every camera that had a tourist behind it (not to mention professionals) took a picture of it, it had struggled for so long under impossible circumstances. It was a sort of natural dwarf (bonsai) since that kind of pine usually grows eighty or a hundred feet and this one was barely six. Finally there was a drought and it died.

So my father, seeing that I needed education, kind of steered me into buying this painting and he bought the one of the pine tree. Now, when my mother was in her last years we discussed this painting which had hung for so long on the family house's walls, because I had a load of my own paintings by that time, for she lived ninety-three years; so she told me, let's give it to the Yosemite Park Historical Society Museum in the Yosemite Valley Museum complex up there, so I did that, and a couple of years later I noticed (when my wife and I were up there) that there was an Obata exhibit at the time in the same museum, so we went by and there was the companion painting to the one I have exhibited in a place of honor!

So that isn't that extraordinary a story after all!