Holdredge - Sioux Encampment in the Rocky Mountains

Ransome Gillet Holdredge (1836 - 1899) was an early San Francisco school painter, specializing in Northern California landscapes.

Biography

Holdredge was born in 1836, and moved to the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

in the late 1850s, where he became head draughtsman at

Mare Island Mare Island ( Spanish: ''Isla de la Yegua'') is a peninsula in the United States in the city of Vallejo, California, about northeast of San Francisco. The Napa River forms its eastern side as it enters the Carquinez Strait juncture with the ...

Naval Yard. In 1874, with the assistance of friends and patrons, he moved to Paris for two years where he studied painting and traveled around Europe. On his return, he gained a reputation as a leading landscape artist, traveling through the

Western United States The Western United States (also called the American West, the Far West, and the West) is the region comprising the westernmost states of the United States. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term ''the We ...

from

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to it ...

and the

Rocky Mountains The Rocky Mountains, also known as the Rockies, are a major mountain range and the largest mountain system in North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch in straight-line distance from the northernmost part of western Canada, to New Mexico ...

, to

Oregon Oregon () is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of its eastern boundary with Idaho. T ...

and the Sierra Mountains, to Yosemite and to the

, often living with local Native American tribes. He may have been a founder of the Bohemian Club of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

, and was an early member of that association. He helped organize the

San Francisco Art Association The San Francisco Art Association (SFAA) was an organization that promoted California artists, held art exhibitions, published a periodical, and established the first art school west of Chicago. The SFAA – which, by 1961, completed a long sequence ...

and was friends with

Charles Warren Stoddard Charles Warren Stoddard (August 7, 1843 April 23, 1909) was an American author and editor best known for his travel books about Polynesian life. Biography Charles Warren Stoddard was born in Rochester, New York on August 7, 1843. He was desce ...

and

Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson (born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson; 13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as ''Treasure Island'', ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll a ...

. After achieving fame, he attained some wealth, which he subsequently squandered on drink. He died destitute, on or around April 15, 1899. There are claims that Holdredge served as a field artist for

Scribner's Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner's or Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing American authors including Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Marjorie Kinnan Rawli ...

or was present at

Major Reno Marcus Albert Reno (November 15, 1834 – March 30, 1889) was a United States career military officer who served in the American Civil War where he was a combatant in a number of major battles, and later under George Armstrong Custer in the Gr ...

's actions at

Custer's Last Stand The Battle of the Little Bighorn, known to the Lakota and other Plains Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and also commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, Nor ...

, but these claims are disputed.

Career

Holdredge was recognized as a great painter during his life. His paintings are in the permanent collections of many museums, particularly those specializing in California artists. His works are (or have been) displayed in the Shumate Collection of the

Oakland Museum of California The Oakland Museum of California or OMCA (formerly the Oakland Museum) is an interdisciplinary museum dedicated to the art, history, and natural science of California, located adjacent to Oak Street, 10th Street, and 11th Street in Oakland, Cal ...

, the

De Young Museum The de Young Museum, formally the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, is a fine arts museum located in San Francisco, California. Located in Golden Gate Park, it is a component of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, along with the California Pala ...

, the Hart Collection at the Sonoma County Museum, the

Utah Museum of Fine Arts The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) is the region's primary resource for culture and visual arts. It is located in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building in Salt Lake City, Utah on the University of Utah campus near Rice-Eccles Stadium. Works ...

, Sacramento's Crocker Museum,

Society of California Pioneers The Society of California Pioneers, established in 1850, is dedicated to the study and enjoyment of California art, history, and culture. Founded by individuals arriving in California before 1850 and thriving under the leadership of several gener ...

, Bohemian Club,

University of California Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

's Bancroft Library, Prescott, Arizona's Phippen Museum of Western Art, The Colorado Heritage Center at the Colorado Historical Society in Denver, Colorado, Reno's Sierra Nevada Museum, Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, Hearst Art Gallery at

Saint Mary's College of California Saint Mary's College of California is a private Catholic college in Moraga, California. Established in 1863, it is affiliated with the Catholic Church and administered by the De La Salle Brothers. The college offers undergraduate and graduate ...

, Jack S

Blanton Museum of Art The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art (often referred to as the Blanton or the BMA) at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the largest university art museums in the U.S. with 189,340 square feet devoted to temporary exhibitions, permanent col ...

, Oregon Historical Society in Portland, Oregon, and

Rockwell Museum The Rockwell Museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate museum of American art located in the Southern Tier region of New York in downtown Corning, New York. Frommer's describes it as "one of the best-designed small museums in the Northeast." In 2015, T ...

in Corning, NY. Prior to his studies in Europe, Holdredge painted in the

Hudson River School The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. The paintings typically depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area ...

style of realism, and signed his works with the surname spelled ''Holdridge''. In Europe, he developed a romantic style evocative of the

Barbizon School The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement towards Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name ...

, and began spelling his surname as ''Holdredge''.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Holdrege, Ransome Gillett 19th-century American painters American male painters Painters from California Hudson River School painters American landscape painters 1836 births 1899 deaths Artists of the American West 19th-century American male artists