Belle Austin

"Bluebonnets" Small Texas Landscape

Circa 1930s

Julian Onderdonk "Summer Evening S. W. Texas" Texas Hill Country (1882 - 1922) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 9 x 12 Frame Size: 15 x 18 Medium: Oil on panel Dated 1909 "Summer Evening S. W. Texas" "A Texas Painter Worked Under the Radar in New York," By Eve M. Kahn, March 6, 2014, The New York Times Onderdonk, a San Antonio native who died of an intestinal ailment in 1922, at 40, is best known for painting swaths of Texas bluebonnets. Those canvases can bring more than $500,000 each, while his New York scenes usually end up in the five-figure range. Onderdonk’s parents were painters in San Antonio, and in 1901, when he was a teenager, they sent him to New York for training. Through 1909, he lived in various Manhattan apartments and Staten Island houses. He then returned to Texas, but continued to spend months at a time in New York. In 1902 he had married a Manhattan teenage neighbor, Gertrude Shipman. While she focused on raising their daughter, Adrienne, and worrying about their strained finances, “he created more than 600 works of art, often producing a painting or two a day,” Eyewitnesses recorded his prolific pace in New York, but Onderdonk works bearing those dates rarely turn up. The puzzling gap in his productivity is explained in family correspondence that the Bakers uncovered: The artist admits that he was signing pieces with pseudonyms. He mostly used Chas. Turner and Chase Turner and occasionally resorted to Elbert H. Turner and Roberto Vasquez. Julian Onderdonk was the son of the important Texas landscapist, Robert Onderdonk. He was the father's pupil at age 16. Sponsored by a Texas patron, he studied at the Art Students League in New York when he was 19, the pupil of Kenyon Cox, Frank DuMond, and Robert Henri. He also studied with William Merritt Chase on Long Island. In 1902, having lost his Texas patron because he married, he asked $18 for 12 paintings at a Fifth Avenue dealer in New...

Helen Slimp (1890 - 1995) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 12 x 16 Frame Size: 18 1/2 x 22 1/2 Signed Lower Right Medium: Oil on Board "Bluebonnets" Helen Slimp (1890 - 1995) A Virgini...