Road to the Hills

Julian Onderdonk painted the Texas landscape with the eye of a New York-trained Impressionist and the devotion of a native San Antonian. The son of painter Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, he studied at the Chase School and at the Art Students League before returning to Texas around 1909, where he spent the remainder of his short life documenting the Hill Country and the South Texas brush country with sustained plein-air intensity. Works from this period, roughly 1910 to 1920, are considered the core of his achievement: Impressionism applied to a landscape tradition that had been largely ignored by serious American painters. The bluebonnet fields and cedar-lined roads he depicted so keenly helped establish a visual identity for the Texas countryside that still resonates in the state's cultural self-image. Onderdonk exhibited with the San Antonio Art League and attracted significant regional patronage; his canvases from this decade now appear regularly at major Texas auctions and in the permanent collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Witte Museum.