William Wendt (1865-1946) Spring Time signed and dated 'WILLIAM WENDT. 1923.' (lower right) and titled (on the stretcher bar) oil on canvas 25 x 30in framed 32 x 37in Painted in 1923. Footnotes: Provenance Stendahl Art Galleries, Los Angeles, California. The Collection of Margaret Jonsson Rogers, Carmel, California and Dallas, Texas. Literature J.A. Walker, Documents on the Life and Art of William Wendt, California's Painter Laureate of the Paysage moralisé, Big Pine, 1992, p. 188, no. 656. William Wendt's adoption of an impressionistic style can be dated to 1896-97 when he and his close friend George Garnder Symons were painting together on the Malibu Rancho near Los Angeles. Both men were in the avant-garde of American painters at the time in that they were open to the Impressionist style that had begun in France in the mid-19th century. As it turns out, Southern California was to be a perfect location for translating the bright colors, atmospheric conditions, and shimmering light that were characteristic of the Impressionist style. Before 1915, Wendt worked with rather tentative, feathery brushstrokes, but thereafter he developed a bold, self-confident and unique style which one critic termed masculine impressionism. It melded impressionism with a distinctly modernist flair. He produced landscapes with a distinct broader, bold brush. His clouds could be compared to white boulders. Eugen Neuhaus wrote of Wendt: He sings of spring in its rich greens and more often of the joyful quality of summer in typical tawny browns, in decorative broad terms. Spring Time was painted in 1923, at the height Wendt's career. His characteristic greens and browns are fused into a zig zag effect through the center of the canvas as the viewer's eye is brought deep into the distance. The oak trees are balanced to and fro as the hills roll away from the painter's vantage point, the moon rising in the sky – a distinctly California landscape. William Wendt, now considered a giant among American Artists, is often referred to as The Dean of Southern California. He painted exactly what he saw in nature with warm colors and outstanding effects of light and shadow. The tranquility, strength and sense of well-being of his work appealed to a wide audience. It had a sober sort of poetry about it, one critic wrote 'like in fine, familiar hymns'.