Scottsdale Art Auction will hold its 8th annual sale on March 31, 2012 at 7176 Main Street in the heart of Scottsdale, Arizona’s gallery district in Old Town. The Southwest’s largest art auction, SAA has established itself as the premier event of the Western art auction season. Paintings in oil and watercolor and bronzes by Masters of the American West as well as works by skilled and sought after contemporary artists will appeal to a wide variety of tastes. Offerings in sporting and wildlife art will fill out this extraordinary assembly of masterworks. The works will be on exhibition in the days prior to the sale in Scottsdale’s state-of-the-art facility, and on the evening of Friday, March 30, there will be a gala Preview in the gallery.
Among the many highlights in the 2012 auction are a number of paintings by Frank Tenney Johnson (1874-1939), one of the most celebrated artists of the American West.
Born in the Midwest, Johnson studied in Milwaukee under Richard Lorenz (1858-1914), whose cinematic paintings of men and horses and tales of his experiences in the West inspired the young artist. Johnson eventually settled in Southern California in the very heart of the nascent movie business, achieved his first fame painting murals in movie theaters. He sold many works to the new moguls and starred in more than one early silent cowboy picture. His finest achievement, however, may lie in his Western nocturnes, paintings of lone cowboys as they watched the herds at night. Using deep blues and aquas, Johnson allows us to peer into and experience the darkness and silence of the vast prairies, deserts and canyons on the long trails.
One of the works, entitled When All’s Quiet, is a magnificent 24 x 30 inch canvas depicting a cowboy, a night herder, on a white horse, lighting up as the herd slumbers in the background. The profile of the cowboy, lit in the glow of a match, is vintage, classic Frank Tenney Johnson.
But Johnson wasn’t the first to attempt to depict nighttime in the American West. Frederic Remington (1861-1909)—who, along with Charles M. Russell (1864-1926), remains the most iconic of Western masters—began to experiment with the nocturne just after 1900, in a suite of oil paintings for his novel, The Way of An Indian. In 2011, the Scottsdale Art Auction sold two of the original paintings—both, as it happens, nocturnes—from the book: Pretty Mother of the Night and The Wolves Sniffed Along the Trail. Each of these works exceeded their estimates and sold for over one million dollars. Works by both Remington and Russell will be featured in the 2012 sale.