On the Old Blanco Road, Southwest Texas

Julian Onderdonk painted this work in 1909, at a period when he was consolidating a distinctly Texan vision after formative study under William Merritt Chase in New York. Chase had schooled him in the Impressionist discipline of broken color, rapid optical response and the primacy of light over local tone, and Onderdonk carried that training home to San Antonio with specific consequences: the cedars, live oaks, bluebonnets and limestone country of the Hill Country became his studio. On the Old Blanco Road exemplifies the mature phase of this synthesis, using the Impressionist vocabulary of flickering brushwork and shadow rendered in color rather than black to capture a landscape that most American painters of his generation had never attempted. Onderdonk would go on to become the painter most closely identified with the Texas bluebonnet spring, but this earlier Hill Country road scene shows him equally absorbed by the drier, more austere beauty of the summer plateau. Works from this period are held in major Texas institutional collections, and Onderdonk is widely regarded as the father of Texas landscape painting, the first artist to bring a fully formed Impressionist sensibility to bear on the state's specific light and terrain.