Jane Alexiadis: Painting by John Augustus Dominique

Q I inherited a picture from a great-aunt, but I don't remember ever seeing it in her home. It's a mountain landscape with trees. It looks like a name is scratched into the lower right hand corner, as well as "48." It measures 24 by 30 inches, with its gold frame. Any help you can give me identifying and appraising this work would be appreciated.

A After living for 20-plus years in California, I'm finally beginning to recognize and identify certain landscape features in art. Mountain ranges, representations of trees and plants, and patterns of sunlight and shadow all help identify the work of California's en plein-air artists.

The French words en plein-air (literally "in open air") signify a work painted directly from nature and capturing an artist's immediate impression of a scene, rather than one done in a studio and based on studies. The development of the plein-air style coincided with mid-19th-century advances in photographic and moving-picture technology, which helped popularize the idea of capturing a scene at a particular moment.

One of California's most prolific plein-air artists was John Augustus Dominique. It is his graffito signature and date on the lower right of your painting.

After his birth in Sweden in 1893, his family moved to Portland, Oregon, when Dominique was still young. His father trained as a florist and worked as a landscape architect.

Dominique himself first was employed as a typesetter and cartoonist in Oregon, where he also took art lessons. In 1914, he moved to California to study at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) and the San Francisco Institute of Art (now the San Francisco Art Institute). At the 1915 Panama- Pacific International Exposition he saw works by Claude Monet and Edvard Munch. He continued to study art, and his biography indicates that most of his teachers were impressionists.

After military service in Maryland, Dominique moved to Santa Barbara, where his father had designed the gardens for a large estate. He lived and painted on Montecito's Ward Estate for nearly a decade and developed a love for the mountains near Ojai and surrounding areas, now recognized as a frequent subject of his paintings.

Your painting depicts one of the highest peaks in the Topatopa Mountains, near Dominique's Santa Barbara home. It illustrates an oak-tree landscape with Cobblestone Mountain in the distance. To judge from the foliage on the trees and the proliferation of red poppies, your work was most likely done in the spring or summer of 1948.

Dominique continued working, exhibiting and teaching art until his death, in 1994. Interestingly, an infection damaged his sight in 1975, and works painted after that date are done in an abstract style he had abandoned decades earlier.

This 1948 oil on canvas is a classic example of Dominique's work. Over the decades he was living in Santa Barbara, he likely painted hundreds of views of these mountains and canyons, capturing the light of the moment in each one.

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Jane Alexiadis: Painting by John Augustus Dominique