(San Francisco Peaks, Arizona)

George Elbert Burr

By the 1920s, Ohio-born George Elbert Burr had come to love the Southwest and had taken several trips to Arizona and New Mexico to study its unusual geological make-up and weather patterns. Eventually Burr and his wife, Elizabeth, would relocate from Colorado to Arizona for George’s health, where they would live out the rest of their lives in Phoenix. The primarily self-taught artist took to the arid landscape with ease. Among his most famous works are those of the Southwest desert in all of its drama, and he often worked in the field, sketching summer and winter scenes before returning home to paint or etch his observations in a more formal manner.

In this color pencil drawing, Burr has depicted the famous San Francisco Peaks, the sharp vestiges of a stratovolcano that formed in the otherwise flat desert nearly 1 million years ago, which feature the tallest peak in the entire state of Arizona - Humphreys Peak - at 12,633 feet. Burr uses purple and blue hues to document the distant range through the Sonoran Desert atmosphere, and captures the small scrubs and sage dotting the flat plain.