Maine, between 1917 and 1921. Preston Dickinson sets up his easel facing a rolling landscape. The American artist, usually fascinated by urban geometries, explores the countryside here with great pictorial freedom.
An Explosion of Fauvist Colors
Observe the vigorous treatment of the pictorial material. Thick brushstrokes sculpt trees, hills, and buildings. The golden yellow of the fields dialogues with the deep blues of the terrain. Dickinson applies paint in an almost impulsive manner, creating a textured surface vibrant with energy. The tree in the foreground spreads its branches. Houses nestle in the valley, rendered with quick and generous touches. He captures the raw emotion of the landscape. The non-figurative colors and the gesture of the brush owe everything to French Fauvism.
Between Cézanne and American Expressionism
Dickinson discovers the landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire during his Parisian sojourn. These works by Cézanne transform his artistic vision. Upon returning to the United States, he transposes this modernist lesson to the hills of Maine. Unlike his more geometric urban compositions, this landscape privileges emotion over Cubist construction. The dating of the work remains debated: probably painted between 1917 and 1921, it belongs to Dickinson’s most expressive landscapes.
Preston Dickinson, the Artist Between Two Worlds
Preston Dickinson (1889-1930) navigates between European modernism and American tradition. A student of William Merritt Chase, he absorbs Fauvism during his Parisian stays. This work perfectly illustrates his transitional period toward a highly personal gestural style.
Think about it
💭 When have you observed a familiar landscape with completely fresh eyes, as if you were discovering it for the first time?
About This Work
- Maine Landscape
- Preston Dickinson
- circa 1917-1921
- Oil on canvas
- 50.96 × 61.91 cm (20 1/16 × 24 3/8 in.)
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection
- (35.18.3)
- https://collections.lacma.org/node/172062
Maine Through a Modernist Eye
Maine Landscape is one of the characteristic works of Preston Dickinson (New York, 1889 – Irun, Spain, 1930), an important figure of early American modernism situated between Precisionism and the Cézannist influence. The composition depicts the Maine countryside, hills, trees, scattered farm buildings, in a palette that sets golden yellows against deep blues, applied with the directness of touch inherited from Cézanne’s technique. The simple geometry of the volumes and the clarity of the contours align this landscape with the Precisionist principles emerging simultaneously in American painting during the 1910s and 1920s.
Between Paris and America
Dickinson spent several years in Paris between 1910 and 1914, studying at the École des beaux-arts and encountering at close range the works of Cézanne, the Cubists, and the Expressionists. That European stay was formative: it allowed him to absorb Cézanne’s formal lesson, construction through planes, color as structure rather than description, and to carry it back to the American motifs he painted on his return. Maine, Ohio, the Hudson Valley: Dickinson applied to these distinctly American landscapes a vision shaped by the European avant-garde, opening one of the more interesting passages between French modernism and American realism. He died in Irun, Spain, at only forty years old, leaving a body of work that is relatively small but internally consistent and immediately recognizable.
The Harrison Collection at LACMA
Maine Landscape entered the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the collection of William Preston Harrison and his wife, one of the foundational donations to the museum’s American painting department. This provenance illustrates how American modernism entered museum collections: through private collectors who, as early as the 1920s and 1930s, had recognized the value of painters then little celebrated by official institutions. LACMA holds this canvas today as one of the markers of American modernist painting in the interwar period.
