Lot Notes
Fred Grayson Sayre's position as one of California's premier desert painters can clearly be seen in his masterpiece Verbena Clad Dunes. This vibrant landscape features a foreground of blooming, windswept dunes whose sandy peaks mimic the majestic mountains rising in the distance.
Sayre moved to California from the mid-west in 1915 to recover from a severe case of diphtheria, and spent his time recuperating in Glendale and Palm Springs (or Thermal). While Sayre was a successful pen and ink illustrator in Chicago, the local desert landscape inspired the artist to turn to watercolor, gouache and finally oil painting. By 1922, Sayre was widely exhibiting his work in both San Francisco, at the Bohemian Club, and Los Angeles at the Glendale Chamber of Commerce. He co-founded the Painters and Sculptors Club with Joseph Kleitsch in 1923 and in 1931 his work The Desert in Bloom was chosen for the Gardena High School acquisition program.
Sayre had great affinity for the desert landscape and attributed his recovery from diphtheria largely to this environment. He often worked for months at a time on site, completely immersing himself in his subject. He described his experiences in a talk given in 1926, "There is something in the desert that meets the call of the artist. I have spent four months at a time in the Coachella Valley and it is always different. I sought for years to depict the mountain haze which adds as much to the western picture, as perfume does to the rose. Clear mountains can be painted easily, but painting the haze has been difficult. I feel a message in the vast, lonely spaces and that is what I am struggling to put into the picture" (as quoted in Redfern Gallery, Fred Grayson Sayre, Laguna Beach, California, 1985)
In Verbena Clad Dunes, Sayre juxtaposes an intimate foreground of delicately blooming verbena blossoms with a vast mountain-filled space. He boldly paints the verbena, carefully delineating each blossom from the next, while in the same scene he portrays the distant mountains cloaked in an atmospheric haze that is synonymous with the western desert.
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