Maynard Dixon (1875-1946) Tehachapi Mountains (Study for Deer Heaven) signed with initials, inscribed and dated 'M.D. / Tehachapi Mts Apr 1930' (lower left), signed again, titled and inscribed 'Maynard Dixon / 728 Montgomery. San Fran.' (on the reverse) oil on canvasboard 16 x 20in framed 21 x 25in Painted in 1930. Footnotes: Provenance The artist. Edith Hamlin, the artist's widow. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Collection of Wesley M. Burnside, Provo, Utah. Private collection, Woodside, California. Sale, Butterfield & Butterfield, San Francisco, Selected American and European Paintings and Sculpture, November 8, 1984, sale 3482P, lot 2157. Private collection, San Francisco, California. The present work was the study for Deer Heaven, one of Maynard Dixon's most powerful and lauded landscapes. The work dates to an important historical moment in Dixon's career following the stock market crash of Fall 1929. Dixon felt the effects of The Great Depression immediately, with commissions and sales coming to a screeching halt. In the Spring of 1930, he withdrew to a cabin in the remote Tehachapi Mountains with fellow artist Arthur Haddock. The desolation of the region — an area hospitable only to deer and cattle — spoke to Dixon's sensibilities but also eloquently captured the zeitgeist of the Great Depression. As Dixon's biographer eloquently notes, '...Tehachapi's wildness captured Maynard's thoughts and he wondered what these lonesome mountains meant to the people who had lived there centuries before.' 1 The present study shares some of the features that made the final version a prize-winner — a heightened color contrast between the land and sky, a delight in expressing monumentality through a tightly-cropped composition and scale, and the use of elongated shadows to carve the hillside. 1 D.J. Hagerty, Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon, Utah, Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1993, p. 167.