Paintings in Inventory (Click on an image for a larger view)
William Lees Judson studied art in New York with John B. Irving and in Paris at the Julian Academy in the 1870s before moving to Ontario, Canada, where he spent a decade as a farmer but also taught art at Dellmuth College. He moved to Los Angeles in 1893 and eventually became the head of the College of Fine Arts in Garvanza, a division of U.S.C. In 1907, Antony E. Anderson, the Los Angeles Times art critic, called Judson “an indefatigable worker [who] somehow finds the time, even in the midst of his many duties as dean of the College of Fine Arts, to paint numerous pictures, landscape and figure in oils and watercolors.” (May 5, 1907). His 1906 exhibition at the college featured thirty paintings, half of them watercolors. Judson was an annual participant in California Art Club exhibitions and a pillar of the early Southern California art community. His landscapes are realistic depictions of real scenery filtered through his poetic temperament. In this work the warm tones of the orange sunset are contrasted with the cool blue palette of the foreground snow.
(Biographical information and reference from Nancy Mouré, Southern California Art).
