Snowed In - Calaveras Hotel

William Seltzer Rice

The exact location of this rustic, snowed-in hotel in Calaveras County is unknown. William Rice loved the outdoors and was particularly fond of the landscape of the Sierra Nevada in California. Calaveras is a county located in the both the Gold Country and the High Sierra. Other of his works of this region of California include Big Trees in Snow, Calaveras Resort, Mountain Shacks in Winter, Old Sawmill Groveland, Sierra Snowbank, and Winter at Dorrington.

"Snowed In..." is an exceptional example of Rice's color woodcuts, the color applied to the blocks with brushes, like a painting. The artist would also use his fingers to apply the oil-based inks to the surface to achieve special effects, such as lighting within the composition. The impressions of "Snowed In..." vary from one to another, the artist had no intention of printing a formal "edition" and rarely printed more than a dozen impressions.

Rice bought his papers in San Francisco's Chinatown. It was soft and accepted ink well. He would often run the paper through the press with a piece of canvas and transfer the texture to the surface of the paper. In this impression he allowed this texture to show through as little specks of white light, as he did in the shadows in the snow and the blue sky.

William S. Rice was born in Manheim, Pennsylvania. After completing studies at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, a job offer brought him to California in 1900.

At the age of twenty-seven, he accepted the position as Supervisor of Art in the Stockton Public Schools; a position he held until 1910. That same year, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where, for the next thirty years, Rice taught in Alameda and Oakland, as well as at the University of California Extension and the California College of Arts and Crafts where he earned his BFA in 1929.

During the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, Rice had a chance to study and absorb the techniques of the Japanese woodcuts that he was to incorporate into his own working knowledge of the medium.

In 1918, the first major exhibition of his color woodcuts hung at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Though he gained national recognition for his printmaking, Rice embodied the Craftsman spirit, painting with watercolor and oil, and working in ceramics, hammered copper, and woodworking. He authored three books on the subject of block printing, including Block Prints: How to Make Them, and penned articles on naturalist subjects for Sunset Magazine.