The Domes. Yo-Semite.

 

James David Smillie

  1833 - 1909 (biography)

1871  

oil on canvas 

13 1/8 x 16 1/8" image 

signed in pigment with the artist's monogram JDS in lower left 

 

titled in pigment in lower left corner: The Domes. / Yo-Semite. Aug. '71"; labels on verso from shows at Fresno Arts Center and Palm Springs Desert Museum 

 

 

 

 

BC233 

SOLD

James D. Smillie visited Yosemite with his brother George in 1871 during the summer months of June through September. In the Yosemite section of "Picturesque America" Smillie wrote of his descent into Yosemite: "Every change of position presented some new charm—trees grouped into picturesque foregrounds, finding bold relief in light and shade against the opal and amethyst tints of distant granite cliffs; flowers nodding in the breeze that brought refreshment to the brow and music to the ear; and little streams dimpling and gurgling across the trail, as if unconscious of the terrible leaps that must be taken before reaching the river below. In strong contrast to this living, moving beauty, beyond all, the walls, towers, and domes of the Yosemite rose grand, serene, impassive, broadly divided into tenderest shadow and sweetest sunlight, giving no impression of cold, implacable, unyielding granite, but of majesty, to which our hearts went out as readily as to the flowers and brooks at our feet." In his oil, "The Domes. Yo-Semite," James D. Smillie created a distant view across the valley floor depicting the dome of Mt. Watkins on the left and on the right, across the valley, the sheared granite face of Half Dome.