Porfirio Salinas Art
American, 1910-1972
(1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officers lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.(Biography provided by Charles Morin Fine Art)
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Artist: Porfirio Salinas
"PRICKLY PEAR PATH " TEXAS HILL COUNTRY CACTUS Frame Size: 21 x 25
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 12 x 16
Frame Size: 21 x 25
Medium: Oil
Dated 1958
"Prickly Pear Path" Texas Hill Country
Biography
Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.
From
the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained
one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works
remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of
the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the
state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become
widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President
Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam
Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives,
and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so
enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be
associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio
Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the
Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are
included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art.
Porfirio
Salinas was born on November 6, 1910 near the small town of Bastrop,
Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas
(1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a
hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to
give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father
was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the
scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of
the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist.
For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently
to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop,
Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of
pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the
middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as
well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of
Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to
Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family.
As a child growing up in
the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted
incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work
that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later
in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose
textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed."
Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching
artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter,
Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the
most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older,
professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to
leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a
professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a
career with any future for his son.
When Salinas was about
fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met
Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to
work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from
Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was
already an established professional artist, he did not have a great
deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the
academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to
augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas
was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San
Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to
sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the
English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills
outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of
fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of
Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they
changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious
work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in
the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a
1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist
Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in
one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint
them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is
accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent
young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long.
The
formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas
Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the
eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of
paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio
from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring,
the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic
Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the
United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis
Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's
reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River
City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the
area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had
already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their
home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held,
more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers
saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state
and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning
paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young
Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors
- Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in
the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take
several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for
"Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still
on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately,
Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable
endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after
they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make
wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist
Texas collectors.
In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas
hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the
sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner
by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young
artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were
settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert
Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small
paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to
see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions. While
a few of his early works have a soft, tonalist quality, with subtle
gradations of sunset colors, most were painted in a style that fits
well within the currents of the late American Impressionist style, with
solid drawing and a warm, chromatic palette. Like Robert Wood's works
of the 1930s, the paintings Salinas produced as a young man were
usually well composed and detailed views of the spring wildflowers in
full bloom in the Texas countryside. In contrast to Wood's work,
however, early Salinas compositions were usually pure landscapes
without the pioneer farms or dilapidated fences that Wood often used to
add visual interest to his wildflower scenes, and he also painted
scenes of San Antonio itself as his mentor Jose Arpa had done. To
residents of the Hill Country, Salinas was especially adept at
accurately capturing the palette of the region and its unique
atmosphere.
In 1939 Salinas began working with Dewey Bradford
(1896-1985), one of the great characters of Texas art. Bradford was a
second-generation dealer whose family operated the Bradford Paint
Company in Austin, where they sold art supplies, framed artwork,
restored paintings and exhibited paintings by Texas artists. Salinas
was struggling when he met Bradford, but the older man took the young
artist under his wing and began to sell his work reliably, even though
the prices that people would pay for a painting were still low due to
the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bradford was a born
salesman with a gift for storytelling, and truth be told, a bit of
embroidery. The relationship between Bradford and Salinas was often
rocky, but it was to last the rest of the artist's life and give him a
modest sense of loyalty and security, things which are all too rare in
the art world. While Bradford could be critical of his work, Salinas
knew that he had a dealer who encouraged him, believed in him and was
not shy about singing his praises to anyone who entered Bradford's
store on Guadalupe Street.
During the early years of World
War II Salinas met a pretty Mexican woman from Guadalajara named Maria
Bonillas, who was working as a secretary for the Mexican National
Railways office in San Antonio. While he was walking downtown with a
painting of a bullfighter under his arm, he started a conversation with
the young woman, and things progressed rapidly. The couple were married
on February 15, 1942 and settled into life in bi-lingual San Antonio
and they eventually purchased a tidy stone home on Buena Vista street
that had a detached studio in back. By the time the United States
entered World War II, Salinas was starting to make a decent living
selling his art and beginning to garner recognition across Texas.
However, in 1943, like millions of other young men, he was drafted into
the service of his country. Fortunately, as an older Army draftee with
special talents, after his training he was assigned to Fort Sam
Houston, right in San Antonio, allowing him to remain at home while
still completing his obligation to "Uncle Sam." Because of his artistic
abilities, Salinas was asked to do paintings for the Army as well as a
mural for the Officer's Club, which has been re-discovered in recent
years. In his spare time he kept working on landscapes and when the war
ended in 1945, he was not faced with the same rocky transition from
military to civilian life as many veterans. That same year, Salinas
became a father as he and Maria celebrated the birth of his only child,
Christina Maria Salinas.
Like most landscape artists of the
era, Salinas was an avid Plein-air painter, and he took his easel and
paint box with him on trips throughout Texas and into Mexico. He and
his wife traveled deep into her native country, where the artist
painted the majestic volcanic peaks of Iztaccihuatl (known as the
"Sleeping Woman" because of its unique shape) and Popocatepetl (called
the "smoking mountain" because the volcano is still active), south of
Mexico City. Salinas also painted studies of rustic villages and their
residents. While his most popular paintings were always the scenes of
the Texas Bluebonnets and other wildflowers that bloom all over the
Hill Country in the spring, he also painted scenes of the twisted Texas
oak trees of central Texas, the more arid landscapes of the Texas
panhandle and West Texas, and the historic Texas missions; he even sold
rapidly executed scenes of bullfights and cockfights for
Mexican-American collectors.
By the late 1940s, the American
economy was finally growing again and wealthier Texans began to collect
Salinas paintings, purchasing them from galleries in San Antonio and
Dallas and at Dewey Bradford's County Store Gallery in Austin. Salinas
also sold work to the Atlanta dealer Dr. Carlton Palmer, who
represented Robert W. Wood for many years. In 1948 Palmer sold two
large Salinas paintings to the Citizen National Bank in Abilene, Texas.
Because Austin was the state capitol, Bradford counted many of the
state's elite among his patrons, and due to his interest in history and
literature, he played a large role in the cultural history of central
Texas. Bradford introduced a number of the major Texas political
figures to Salinas' work, including Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973),
who was then in the House of Representatives and on his way to winning
a controversial election that vaulted him in the United States Senate.
Johnson became an enthusiastic collector, as did his political mentor,
the legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn (1882-1961). Johnson decorated
his Washington offices with Salinas paintings and he brought a number
of them home to his vast LBJ Ranch, near Johnson City, Texas. In spite
of his important patrons, Salinas went through a fallow and difficult
period in the late 1950s. He had a volatile temperament, which made
relationships difficult, and it took great patience for his wife to
help him manage his career.
As Salinas entered middle age his
work began to sell steadily, but except for tourists who purchased his
paintings in San Antonio, he was known primarily only to Texas art
collectors. All that changed in 1961 with the election of John F.
Kennedy (1917-1963) to the Presidency of the United States and his
running mate Lyndon Johnson to the Vice Presidency. Johnson was an
expansive, larger-than-life character and his status as a long, tall
Texan in a cowboy hat was a large part of his imposing political image.
During his storied career in the House of Representatives and the
United States Senate, Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) spent
their time in Washington in a modest house on the edge of Rock Creek
Park, but this home would not do for a Vice President. So, in 1961, the
Johnsons purchased a French chateau-styled home in the Spring Valley
section of the Capitol. Obtained from the famed socialite and
ambassador Perle Mesta (1889-1975), the house came with a fine
collection of French furniture and tapestries, and the designer
Genevieve Hendricks was hired to meld the French look with objects from
the Johnsons' overseas travels and paintings of the flora and fauna of
their native Texas. Featured prominently in the foyer were the
paintings of Porfirio Salinas. Because of the Johnsons' patronage, his
work was mentioned in Time Magazine and other national publications.
Lady Bird Johnson loved her landscapes of the Texas Hill Country and
told reporters that, "I want to see them when ever I open the door, to
remind me where I come from."
After President Kennedy's death
thrust Lyndon Johnson into the Presidency, he brought his Salinas
paintings into the historic halls of the White House, further enhaning
the Texas painter's national reputation. At the time of the President
Kennedy's assassination, Salinas had completed a scene of a horse
drinking titled "Rocky Creek" that was to have been presented to
Kennedy during his ill-fated visit to Dallas. Instead, in an effort to
memorialize the fallen President, Salinas painted a symbolic work of a
lone horse depicted against foreboding clouds. During his tenure in the
White House, President Johnson presented a Salinas landscape as a state
gift to the President of Mexico, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1911-1979). During
the 1960s, Salinas paintings sold briskly and, thanks to Presidential
patronage, for escalating prices. In an interview with a writer from
the New York Times, President Johnson enthused about the work of "his
favorite artist" and said that, "his work reminds me of the country
around the ranch." Salinas was invited to the LBJ Ranch frequently
during the Johnson administration and his paintings were hung
throughout the ranch, in the President's offices and even in the
private quarters of the White House. The connection to President
Johnson was a great boon to sales of Salinas paintings, and in 1964,
when the demand was at its height, Texas Governor John Connelly
(1917-1993) was told that all Salinas'work was sold and that he would
have to wait for a painting.
In 1960, a half century after his
birth, Salinas was honored by his home town of Bastrop, a celebration
that touched the modest artist. In 1962 Salinas was given a solo
exhibition at the Witte Museum in San Antonio that featured more than
twenty of his works. By the early 1960s, sales of reproductions of the
artist's landscapes by the New York Graphic Society and other
publishers grew rapidly, enlarging his audience throughout the United
States. In 1967, Dewey Bradford helped to organize the production of a
book of Texas stories titled "Bluebonnets and Cactus" (Austin:
Pemberton Press: 1967), which was profusely illustrated with paintings
by Salinas. His works were still popular when Salinas died after a
brief illness in April of 1973, just a few months after former
President Johnson's passing. He was memorialized in the City of Austin
by Porfirio Salinas Day, which honored him for having "done much to
bring the culture of Mexico and Texas together with his paintings."
Bastrop, Texas, the city of the artist's birth, has been holding a
Salinas Art Exhibition annually since 1981.
He painted hundreds of scenes of the wildflowers,
including the various varieties of Blue Lupin, the state flower, as
well as other flowering flora. These show the influence of his artistic
mentors Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa Y Perea. Salinas also painted a
number of scenes of Prickly Pear Cactus that show the influence of the
English painter Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939), who painted many such
works during his tenure in Texas. He painted the more arid Texas
landscape infrequently and these works are very rare today and sought
after by collectors from the Texas Panhandle and West Texas. Salinas
also painted many river landscapes along the Guadalupe, Rio Frio, the
San Antonio and the Rio Grande. On trips to his wife's homeland of
Mexico, he painted a number of scenes of the volcanic peaks as well as
scenes of peasant villages and villagers. Figurative paintings are rare
among Salinas' works and these scenes of bullfights, fandangos and cock
fights are probably the least sought after of his paintings. There are
also a small number of modest marines, painted on trips to the Texas
and California coast. Salinas paintings are highly prized by collectors
of early Texas art, with the paintings of wildflowers in greatest
demand.
Works by Porfirio Salinas can be found in a number of
public collections, including the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in
Canyon, Texas; the Texas State Capitol; the Texas Governor's Mansion;
the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch; the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in
Bonham, Texas; Amarillo High School; the Witte Museum in San Antonio;
the historic Joan and Price Daniel House in San Antonio; the Stark
Museum in Orange, Texas; the R.W. Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport,
Louisiana; the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado; Texas
A & M University and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Salinas has been featured in a number of reference works as well as
anthologies devoted to American Western Art...
Category
1950s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"Bluebonnet Time Hill Country Frame Size: 35 x 41 Bluebonnets, Poppies, Oak Tree
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 27 x 33
Frame Size: 35 x 41
Medium: Oil On Canvas
Late 1940s-Early 1950s
"Bluebonnet Time" Texas Hill Country Landscape
Biography
Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.
From
the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained
one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works
remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of
the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the
state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become
widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President
Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam
Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives,
and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so
enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be
associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio
Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the
Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are
included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art.
Porfirio
Salinas was born on November 6, 1910 near the small town of Bastrop,
Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas
(1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a
hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to
give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father
was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the
scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of
the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist.
For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently
to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop,
Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of
pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the
middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as
well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of
Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to
Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family.
As a child growing up in
the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted
incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work
that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later
in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose
textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed."
Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching
artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter,
Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the
most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older,
professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to
leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a
professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a
career with any future for his son.
When Salinas was about
fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met
Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to
work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from
Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was
already an established professional artist, he did not have a great
deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the
academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to
augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas
was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San
Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to
sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the
English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills
outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of
fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of
Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they
changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious
work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in
the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a
1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist
Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in
one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint
them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is
accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent
young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long.
The
formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas
Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the
eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of
paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio
from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring,
the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic
Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the
United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis
Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's
reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River
City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the
area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had
already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their
home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held,
more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers
saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state
and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning
paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young
Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors
- Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in
the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take
several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for
"Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still
on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately,
Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable
endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after
they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make
wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist
Texas collectors.
In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas
hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the
sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner
by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young
artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were
settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert
Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small
paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to
see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions. While
a few of his early works have a soft, tonalist quality, with subtle
gradations of sunset colors, most were painted in a style that fits
well within the currents of the late American Impressionist style, with
solid drawing and a warm, chromatic palette. Like Robert Wood's works
of the 1930s, the paintings Salinas produced as a young man were
usually well composed and detailed views of the spring wildflowers in
full bloom in the Texas countryside. In contrast to Wood's work,
however, early Salinas compositions were usually pure landscapes
without the pioneer farms or dilapidated fences that Wood often used to
add visual interest to his wildflower scenes, and he also painted
scenes of San Antonio itself as his mentor Jose Arpa had done. To
residents of the Hill Country, Salinas was especially adept at
accurately capturing the palette of the region and its unique
atmosphere.
In 1939 Salinas began working with Dewey Bradford
(1896-1985), one of the great characters of Texas art. Bradford was a
second-generation dealer whose family operated the Bradford Paint
Company in Austin, where they sold art supplies, framed artwork,
restored paintings and exhibited paintings by Texas artists. Salinas
was struggling when he met Bradford, but the older man took the young
artist under his wing and began to sell his work reliably, even though
the prices that people would pay for a painting were still low due to
the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bradford was a born
salesman with a gift for storytelling, and truth be told, a bit of
embroidery. The relationship between Bradford and Salinas was often
rocky, but it was to last the rest of the artist's life and give him a
modest sense of loyalty and security, things which are all too rare in
the art world. While Bradford could be critical of his work, Salinas
knew that he had a dealer who encouraged him, believed in him and was
not shy about singing his praises to anyone who entered Bradford's
store on Guadalupe Street.
During the early years of World
War II Salinas met a pretty Mexican woman from Guadalajara named Maria
Bonillas, who was working as a secretary for the Mexican National
Railways office in San Antonio. While he was walking downtown with a
painting of a bullfighter under his arm, he started a conversation with
the young woman, and things progressed rapidly. The couple were married
on February 15, 1942 and settled into life in bi-lingual San Antonio
and they eventually purchased a tidy stone home on Buena Vista street
that had a detached studio in back. By the time the United States
entered World War II, Salinas was starting to make a decent living
selling his art and beginning to garner recognition across Texas.
However, in 1943, like millions of other young men, he was drafted into
the service of his country. Fortunately, as an older Army draftee with
special talents, after his training he was assigned to Fort Sam
Houston, right in San Antonio, allowing him to remain at home while
still completing his obligation to "Uncle Sam." Because of his artistic
abilities, Salinas was asked to do paintings for the Army as well as a
mural for the Officer's Club, which has been re-discovered in recent
years. In his spare time he kept working on landscapes and when the war
ended in 1945, he was not faced with the same rocky transition from
military to civilian life as many veterans. That same year, Salinas
became a father as he and Maria celebrated the birth of his only child,
Christina Maria Salinas.
Like most landscape artists of the
era, Salinas was an avid Plein-air painter, and he took his easel and
paint box with him on trips throughout Texas and into Mexico. He and
his wife traveled deep into her native country, where the artist
painted the majestic volcanic peaks of Iztaccihuatl (known as the
"Sleeping Woman" because of its unique shape) and Popocatepetl (called
the "smoking mountain" because the volcano is still active), south of
Mexico City. Salinas also painted studies of rustic villages and their
residents. While his most popular paintings were always the scenes of
the Texas Bluebonnets and other wildflowers that bloom all over the
Hill Country in the spring, he also painted scenes of the twisted Texas
oak trees of central Texas, the more arid landscapes of the Texas
panhandle and West Texas, and the historic Texas missions; he even sold
rapidly executed scenes of bullfights and cockfights for
Mexican-American collectors.
By the late 1940s, the American
economy was finally growing again and wealthier Texans began to collect
Salinas paintings, purchasing them from galleries in San Antonio and
Dallas and at Dewey Bradford's County Store Gallery in Austin. Salinas
also sold work to the Atlanta dealer Dr. Carlton Palmer, who
represented Robert W. Wood for many years. In 1948 Palmer sold two
large Salinas paintings to the Citizen National Bank in Abilene, Texas.
Because Austin was the state capitol, Bradford counted many of the
state's elite among his patrons, and due to his interest in history and
literature, he played a large role in the cultural history of central
Texas. Bradford introduced a number of the major Texas political
figures to Salinas' work, including Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973),
who was then in the House of Representatives and on his way to winning
a controversial election that vaulted him in the United States Senate.
Johnson became an enthusiastic collector, as did his political mentor,
the legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn (1882-1961). Johnson decorated
his Washington offices with Salinas paintings and he brought a number
of them home to his vast LBJ Ranch, near Johnson City, Texas. In spite
of his important patrons, Salinas went through a fallow and difficult
period in the late 1950s. He had a volatile temperament, which made
relationships difficult, and it took great patience for his wife to
help him manage his career.
As Salinas entered middle age his
work began to sell steadily, but except for tourists who purchased his
paintings in San Antonio, he was known primarily only to Texas art
collectors. All that changed in 1961 with the election of John F.
Kennedy (1917-1963) to the Presidency of the United States and his
running mate Lyndon Johnson to the Vice Presidency. Johnson was an
expansive, larger-than-life character and his status as a long, tall
Texan in a cowboy hat was a large part of his imposing political image.
During his storied career in the House of Representatives and the
United States Senate, Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) spent
their time in Washington in a modest house on the edge of Rock Creek
Park, but this home would not do for a Vice President. So, in 1961, the
Johnsons purchased a French chateau-styled home in the Spring Valley
section of the Capitol. Obtained from the famed socialite and
ambassador Perle Mesta (1889-1975), the house came with a fine
collection of French furniture and tapestries, and the designer
Genevieve Hendricks was hired to meld the French look with objects from
the Johnsons' overseas travels and paintings of the flora and fauna of
their native Texas. Featured prominently in the foyer were the
paintings of Porfirio Salinas. Because of the Johnsons' patronage, his
work was mentioned in Time Magazine and other national publications.
Lady Bird Johnson loved her landscapes of the Texas Hill Country and
told reporters that, "I want to see them when ever I open the door, to
remind me where I come from."
After President Kennedy's death
thrust Lyndon Johnson into the Presidency, he brought his Salinas
paintings into the historic halls of the White House, further enhaning
the Texas painter's national reputation. At the time of the President
Kennedy's assassination, Salinas had completed a scene of a horse
drinking titled "Rocky Creek" that was to have been presented to
Kennedy during his ill-fated visit to Dallas. Instead, in an effort to
memorialize the fallen President, Salinas painted a symbolic work of a
lone horse depicted against foreboding clouds. During his tenure in the
White House, President Johnson presented a Salinas landscape as a state
gift to the President of Mexico, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1911-1979). During
the 1960s, Salinas paintings sold briskly and, thanks to Presidential
patronage, for escalating prices. In an interview with a writer from
the New York Times, President Johnson enthused about the work of "his
favorite artist" and said that, "his work reminds me of the country
around the ranch." Salinas was invited to the LBJ Ranch frequently
during the Johnson administration and his paintings were hung
throughout the ranch, in the President's offices and even in the
private quarters of the White House. The connection to President
Johnson was a great boon to sales of Salinas paintings, and in 1964,
when the demand was at its height, Texas Governor John Connelly
(1917-1993) was told that all Salinas'work was sold and that he would
have to wait for a painting.
In 1960, a half century after his
birth, Salinas was honored by his home town of Bastrop, a celebration
that touched the modest artist. In 1962 Salinas was given a solo
exhibition at the Witte Museum in San Antonio that featured more than
twenty of his works. By the early 1960s, sales of reproductions of the
artist's landscapes by the New York Graphic Society and other
publishers grew rapidly, enlarging his audience throughout the United
States. In 1967, Dewey Bradford helped to organize the production of a
book of Texas stories titled "Bluebonnets and Cactus" (Austin:
Pemberton Press: 1967), which was profusely illustrated with paintings
by Salinas. His works were still popular when Salinas died after a
brief illness in April of 1973, just a few months after former
President Johnson's passing. He was memorialized in the City of Austin
by Porfirio Salinas Day, which honored him for having "done much to
bring the culture of Mexico and Texas together with his paintings."
Bastrop, Texas, the city of the artist's birth, has been holding a
Salinas Art Exhibition annually since 1981.
He painted hundreds of scenes of the wildflowers,
including the various varieties of Blue Lupin, the state flower, as
well as other flowering flora. These show the influence of his artistic
mentors Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa Y Perea. Salinas also painted a
number of scenes of Prickly Pear Cactus that show the influence of the
English painter Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939), who painted many such
works during his tenure in Texas. He painted the more arid Texas
landscape infrequently and these works are very rare today and sought
after by collectors from the Texas Panhandle and West Texas. Salinas
also painted many river landscapes along the Guadalupe, Rio Frio, the
San Antonio and the Rio Grande. On trips to his wife's homeland of
Mexico, he painted a number of scenes of the volcanic peaks as well as
scenes of peasant villages and villagers. Figurative paintings are rare
among Salinas' works and these scenes of bullfights, fandangos and cock
fights are probably the least sought after of his paintings. There are
also a small number of modest marines, painted on trips to the Texas
and California coast. Salinas paintings are highly prized by collectors
of early Texas art, with the paintings of wildflowers in greatest
demand.
Works by Porfirio Salinas can be found in a number of
public collections, including the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in
Canyon, Texas; the Texas State Capitol; the Texas Governor's Mansion;
the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch; the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in
Bonham, Texas; Amarillo High School; the Witte Museum in San Antonio;
the historic Joan and Price Daniel House in San Antonio; the Stark
Museum in Orange, Texas; the R.W. Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport,
Louisiana; the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado; Texas
A & M University and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Salinas has been featured in a number of reference works as well as
anthologies devoted to American Western Art...
Category
1950s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"River Landscape" Fall Texas Hill Country Landscape
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in Austin, TX
A Texas landscape with on a rocky riverbank during the fall. Orange leaves speckle the hillside amongst the evergreen juniper trees.
Porfirio Salinas
20" x 24" Oil on Canvas
Frame s...
Category
20th Century American Realist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
"BULLFIGHTER" MATADOR MEXICO MEXICAN CIRCA 1950s PORFIRIO SALINAS ARTIST
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Size: 16 x 12
Frame: 20 x 16
Medium: Oil
"Bullfighter"
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Tex...
Category
1930s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"TEXAS HILLS AND VALLEYS" HILLCOUNTRY
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 9 x 7
Frame Size: 18 x 22.5
Medium: Oil
Circa late 1930s early 40s
"Texas Hills & Valleys"
Porfirio Salinas was a self-tau...
Category
1930s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"SPRING CREEK PHLOX" TEXAS HILLCOUNTRY
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 16 x 20
Frame Size: 24 x 28
Medium: Oil
"Spring Creek Phlox"
Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields...
Category
20th Century Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"Sleeping Lady Mountain" Image 12 x 16 Frame: 19 x 23
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 12 x 16
Frame Size: 19 x 23
Medium: Oil on Canvas
"Sleeping Lady Mountain" Iztaccihuatl, Volcano in Mexico
Biography
Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officers lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.
From
the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained
one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works
remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of
the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the
state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become
widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President
Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam
Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives,
and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson...
Category
1960s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"HILL COUNTRY RANCH ROAD" TEXAS HILL COUNTRY AUTUMN LARGE SIZE FRAMED 37 X 49
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 24 x 36
Frame Size: 37 x 49
Medium: Oil
Dated 1957
"Hill Country Ranch Road"
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields...
Category
1950s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
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Carmel Beach
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A tranquil oil painting featuring an early evening sunset with people strolling on the main beach in Carmel in front of a majestic sky from Willard Dixon, who is one of the finest American contemporary realist painters today. Dixon has painted coastal landscapes for 35 years, capturing the undeniable beauty of the West with its grand and humble spirit. The painting, with its atmospheric light and calm color palette in natural sky blue and setting sun warm red to purple, is contemporary and serene. The colors are reminiscent of Rothko as they shift in natural bands. Looking at this painting is like looking through a window to a lovely moment as the close of a day.
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Carmel Beach, 18 x 53 inches. Oil on canvas, and traditionally framed in contemporary, minimal oak floater frame.
The artist was born: Kansas City MO, 1942
Education: Art Students League, New York, NY
Cornell University
Brooklyn Museum School
San Francisco Art Institute, M.F.A. 1969
Awards and Commissions
N.E.A. Fellowship Grant- 1989
California Supreme Court Mural Commission- 1998
Las Vegas Federal Courthouse Commission, G.S.A.-1998
Teaching
1989-90: San Francisco State University
1975: San Francisco Art Institute Realism Seminar
1974-76: Academy of Art College, San Francisco, CA
1973-74, 1976: California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA
1971-72: California State University, Hayward, CA
One Man Exhibitions
2015: Willard Dixon Portraits College of Marin Fine Art Gallery, Kentfield
2014: SFMOMA Artists Gallery, San Francisco, CA.
2008: SFMOMA Artists Gallery, San Francisco, CA.
2005: Fischbach Gallery, NYC,NY
2005: Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2004: Fischbach Gallery, NYC, NY.
2002: Earl McGrath Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2002: Bolinas Museum, Bolinas, CA
2001: Hackett Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2000: Fischbach Gallery, NYC , NY
2000: Hearst Art Gallery, St. Mary’s College, Moraga, CA
1998: Hackett Freedman Gallery, SF, CA
1997: Tatistcheff/Rogers Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1996, 1995: Contemporary Realist Gallery (now Hackett Freedman Gallery)
1994: Fischbach Gallery
1993: Contemporary Realist Gallery
1992: Fischbach Gallery
1991: Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 North, Los Angeles, CA
1990: Fischbach Gallery
1989: William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1988: Gallery 454 North, Los Angeles, CA
1987: Fischbach Gallery
1987: Gallery 454 North
1986: William Sawyer Gallery
1985: Fischbach Gallery
1984: Harris Gallery, Houston, Tx
1984: William Sawyer Gallery
1983, 1982: Fischbach Gallery
1981: William Sawyer Gallery
1980,1979: Tortue Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1976, 1975: William Sawyer Gallery
1973, 1972: William Sawyer Gallery
Selected Group Exhibitions
2017: SHIFT / with Elizabeth Barlow, Kim Frohsin, Erin Parrish, Irene Zweig, Andra Norris Gallery, Burlingame, CA
2015: REAL with Elizabeth Barlow Gallerie Citi, Burlingame, CA.
2014: Stillness and Activity / A father and daughter exhibition, Gallerie Citi, Burlingame, CA.
2013: Outwin Boocher Portrait Competition 2013 Exhibition” Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Hey Everybody / Portraits, Diablo Valley College
2012: Artistic Visions of the Golden Gate Bridge”, George Krevsky Gallery, S.F., CA.
Introduction Two/ Gallerie Citi, Burlingame, CA.
2011: California: A Landscape of Dreams/ Fresno Art Museum
2010: Self Portrait Invitational/ Julie Nester Gallery, Park City UT
2009: On Beauty /I. Wolk Gallery, St. Helena, CA.
2008: At Water’s Edge / I. Wolk Gallery, St. Helena, CA.
2007: San Francisco Scenes/ George Krevsky Gallery, S.F., CA
Ten Years- A Retrospective/ Dolby Chadwick Gallery, S.F., CA.
2006: Our Planet, Our Home/ SFMOMA Artists Gallery, S.F. CA
2005: 2005 Spring Group Show/ Earl McGrath Gallery, L.A., CA
2002: H2O’02, Paintings of Water/ Fischbach Gallery, NYC
Scene in Oakland 1852-2002 Oakland Museum Oakland, CA
The Garden/ Art Foundry Gallery, Sacramento, CA
The Moving Still Life/ Fischbach Gallery, New York, NY
Bay Area Printmakers/ works from Trillium Press,
Art Foundry Gallery, Sacramento, CA
California Landscape Paintings/ College of Marin Art Gallery, Kentfield, CA
Bay Area Printmakers/ SF Museum of Modern Art/Artists Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Visions: Northern California/ Bank of America, San Francisco, CA
2001: Opening Exhibit: Group Show, Fischbach Gallery, NY, NY
2000: Hackett Freedman Gallery Artists/ Shasta College Art Gallery, Redding, Ca
1999: Homage to the Art Institute, Artists Who Transformed American
Culture, Hackett Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1999: What is Art For? What are Museums For? What are You For? curated Curated for the Oakland Museum by William T. Wiley & Mary Hull Webster, Oakland, CA
1998: Paintings of Marin County Past and Present/ The North Point Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1997: 10th Anniversary Exhibition/ Hackett Freedman Gallery, S.F., CA
1996: Rediscovering the Landscape of the Americas/ Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM (traveling exhibition)
Contemporary American Realist Painters/ Halls Crown Center Gallery, Kansas City, MO
1996: Foundation for the Future: Celebrating 125 Years at the San Francisco Art Institute/ One Bush St., S.F., CA
1996: New Work by Selected Gallery Artists, Tatistcheff/Rogers Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Flower Paintings/ Contemporary Realist Gallery, S.F., CA
1995: Facing Eden: 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area / De Young Museum, S.F., CA
Contemporary Still Life Painting/ David Klein Gallery, Birmingham, MI
1994: Still Life/ Fischbach Gallery, New York City, NY
New Bay Area Painting/ Contemporary Realist Gallery, S.F., CA
A Room with a View/ The North Point Gallery, S.F., CA
1993: Bay Area Painting/ Contemporary Realist Gallery, S.F., CA
Vanishing Point: A Look at Contemporary Landscape Painting”,
Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA
Tribute/ William Sawyer Gallery, S.F., CA
Revolution: Into the 2nd Century at the San Francisco Art Institute, One Market Plaza, S.F., CA
Contemporary Realism: Central and Northern California Landscapes/ Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA
The Artist as Native: Reinventing Regionalism/ a traveling exhibition curated by Alan Gussow and Babcock Galleries, N.Y., NY
1992: A Day in the Country, California Landscape Painting / I. Wolk Gallery, St. Helena, CA
West Art and the Law/ Weat Publishing Co., St. Paul, MN(traveling ex.) The New York Academy of Art, New York, NY
In Support of Contemporary Bay Area Artists / One Market Plaza, S.F., CA
1991: The Landscape in 20th-Century American Art: Selections from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art/ New York, NY, National Traveling Exhibit
1990: Contemporary Landscapes/ 21st Anniversary Exhibition
Tortue Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
1990: New Bay Area Painting Contemporary Realist Gallery, S.F., CA
1989: The Modern Pastoral/ Robert Scholekopf Gallery, New York, NY
1988: Images of the Land/ William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1988: Ten Artists from the William Sawyer Gallery / Shasta College Gallery, Redding CA
Works on Paper/ William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1987: The Contemporary American Landscape/ Swain Gallery, NJ
1986: Landscape, Seascape, Cityscape/ Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA
1985: The Bay Area Seen/ Bay Area Regionalists Show, Hall of Flowers, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA
Large Scale/ Harris Gallery, Houston, TX
A City Collects/ Transamerica Pyramid, San Francisco, CA
American Realism/ William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1984: San Francisco Bay Area Painting/ curated by George Neubert for the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE
American Landscape Painting/ California State University, L.A. CA
Western Landscape Painters/ The Museum of the West, Houston, TX
The Urban Landscape / One Market Plaza, San Francisco, CA
1982: Collectors Gallery 16/ McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, TX
Thirty Approaches to Realism/ William Sawyer Gallery, S.F., CA
1981: Views of California Past and Present/ Triton Museum, Santa Clara, CA
Landscapes/ Harris Gallery, Houston, TX
110th Anniversary S.F. Art Institute Alumni Group Show/
William Sawyer Gallery, S.F., CA
1980: Realism/ Walnut Creek Civic Arts Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA
1979: Bay Area Artists Exhibition/Sale/ Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA
Omnium Gatherum/ Tortue Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
California Viewpoints/ Sunne Savage Gallery, Boston, MA
1978: New Work/ Mills College Art Gallery, Oakland, CA
Images of the Land/ William Sawyer Gallery, S.F., CA
1977: Contemporary California Artists/ Marshall-Meyers Gallery
Alternative to the Whitney Annual/ James Yu Gallery, N. Y, N.Y.
San Francisco Art Festival/ ( Airport Competition Purchase Prize)
1977: Eight Young Americans/ Montclair Museum of Art, Montclair,NJ
1976: Three From California/ Francine Sedars Gallery, Seattle, WA
Faculty Show/ California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA
1975: Realism in Painting and Ceramics/ Helen Euphrat Gallery,
De Anza College, Cupertino, CA
1975: A Tribute to the Art Institute/ Hansen Fuller Gallery, S.F., CA
California Artists/ Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT
1974: Our Land, Our Sky, Our Water/ by Alfred Frankenstein Expo 74, Spokane, WA
A Sense of Place/ curated by Alan Gussow for the Joslyn Museum, Omaha, NE
The Discovery Gallery, Montclair, N.J.
1973: College of Marin Gallery, Kentfield, CA
California Artists/ Kaiser Center, Oakland, CA
1972: Visiting Artists/ California State University, Hayward, CA
1970: Drawing Invitational/ Emanuel Walter Gallery,
San Francisco Art Institute, S.F., CA
1970: San Francisco Art Institute Centennial Exhibition,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, S.F., CA
1967: Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Annual,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, S.F., CA
1966: California Landscape Painters/ San Francisco Art Institute, S.F. CA.
Selected Collections
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Oakland Museum
The Utah Museum of Fine Art
San Francisco Art Commission
Shaklee Corporation
Pacific Gas and Electric Company, San Francisco, CA
Kemper Insurance Company, Long Grove, Il
Morrison and Foerester, San Francisco, CA
SSI Container Corporation, San Francisco, CA
San Francisco International Airport
Oxford Petroleum Company, Houston,TX
California First Bank, San Francisco, CA
United Pipeline, Houston, TX
Security Pacific National Bank, S.F., CA
Crocker Bank, Los Angeles, CA
Visa Corporation, San Francisco, CA
Atlantic Richfield Corporation
Shell Oil, Houston, TX
First National Bank of Seattle
RREEF Corporation, San Francisco, CA
Texas Heritage Society
Genstar Corporation, San Francisco, CA
Sohio Corporation
Skidmore Owings and Merrill, N.Y.C., NY
Chemical Bank, NY
Swissre Corporation, NY
The Insurance Company of North America
First National Bank of Midland, Texas
Commerce Bank
AMA Headquarters, Washington, DC
Hughes Tool, Houston, TX
ATT, NY
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, San Francisco, CA
IBM Corporation, San Jose, CA
Northern Trust Company, Chicago, IL
Smith Kline and French Corp., Philadelphia, PA
Wells Fargo Bank, San Francisco, CA
Republic National Bank
Chevron
Trammel Crow Company, Dallas, CA
U.S. Insurance Group, N.J.
Southwestern Bell Corp., MO
Union Bank
Pacific Bell
United States Trust Company, NY
The United Bank of Denver, CO
Cigna Corp., Philadelphia, PA
Atlantic Richfield Corp., Los Angeles, CA
Show, Pittman, Pots and Trobridge, Washington, DC
San Francisco Zen Center
Hughes Aircraft Co. Los Angeles, CA
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M), St. Paul, MN
Bank of America, NY
Commerce Bancshares, Inc., Kansas City,MO
Robinson Humphrey/American Express, Atlanta, GA
Merrill Lynch, San Francisco, CA
Goldman Sachs, NY
Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., NY
Victoria Bank and Trust, Victoria, TX
NYNEX, NY
Coca Cola, U.S.A., Atlanta, GA
TransAmerica Corporation
Pacific Telesis Group
Brobeck, Phleger, & Harrison Exxon Corporation
U.S. Trust
Selected Private Collections
Estate of Ahmet Ertegun, New York, NY Mr. Harrison Ford, Los Angeles, CA
Estate of Irving Lazarr, Los Angeles, Ca
Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Holzer, New York, NY
Mr. and Mrs. Peter Asher, Los Angeles, CA
Mr. John Irvin, London, England Ms. Joan Didion, New York , NY
Ms. Sabrina Guinness, London, Eng.
Mr. and Mrs. Austin Hills, San Francisco, CA
Mr. and Mrs. Peter Duchin
Ms. Linda Ronstadt
Ms. Faye Dunaway
Mr . Peter Morton
Mrs H.J. Heinze, New York, NY
Mr. Rupert Lowenstein
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Emery, San Francisco, CA
Mr. Earl Mc Grath, New York, NY
Mr. Nat Weiss, New York, NY
Mr. Luca Barilla
Mr. Bruce Schnietzer, New York, NY
Dr. and Mrs. Robert Carroll, New York, NY
Mrs. Nicholas Boyd, San Francisco, CA
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Green, San Francisco, CA
Mr. Chappy Morris, New York, NY
Ms. Carla Kirkeby, Los Angeles, CA
Mr. and Mrs. Elliot Caplow, Los Angeles, CA
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Meyerowitz, New York, N.Y.
Mr. and Mrs. Steven Gilsendaine
Mrs. Caroline Cushing Graham, Los Angeles, CA
Mr. Michael Nesmith, Los Angeles, CA
Mr. Griffen Dunne, New York, N.Y.
Mr. and Mrs. Paul A. Erskine, Pasadena, CA
Mr. N.J. Friedman, Hillsborough, CA
Mr. Harold Hollingsworth...
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21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Porfirio Salinas Art
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Stopping to water the driven horses Figurative
Located in Soquel, CA
Gorgeous European figurative of a simpler time. Horses being watered in the plains by Janos Viski (Hungarian/American 1891-1965), circa 1940. Signed lower ...
Category
1940s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil, Linen
Love Scorn, classical gestural abstract male nude figure, dog, blues, earth tone
By Tom Bennett
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Homage to baroque allegory, symbolic figurative realism.
About Tom Bennett:
With quick brushstrokes, Tom Bennett creates representational images of human figures and animals, emphas...
Category
2010s American Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil, Canvas
"In Port"
By Edward Willis Redfield
Located in Lambertville, NJ
Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork by:
Edward Willis Redfield (1869 - 1965)
Edward W. Redfield was born in Bridgeville, Delaware, moving to Philadelphia as a young child. Determined to be an artist from an early age, he studied at the Spring Garden Institute and the Franklin Institute before entering the Pennsylvania Academy from 1887 to 1889, where he studied under Thomas Anshutz, James Kelly, and Thomas Hovenden. Along with his friend and fellow artist, Robert Henri, he traveled abroad in 1889 and studied at the Academie Julian in Paris under William Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury. While in France, Redfield met Elise Deligant, the daughter of an innkeeper, and married in London in 1893.
Upon his return to the United States, Redfield and his wife settled in Glenside, Pennsylvania. He remained there until 1898, at which time he moved his family to Center Bridge, a town several miles north of New Hope along the Delaware River. Redfield painted prolifically in the 1890s but it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that he would develop the bold impressionist style that defined his career. As Redfield’s international reputation spread, many young artists gravitated to New Hope as he was a great inspiration and an iconic role model. Edward Redfield remained in Center Bridge throughout his long life, fathering his six children there.
Around 1905 and 1906, Redfield’s style was coming into its own, employing thick vigorous brush strokes tightly woven and layered with a multitude of colors. These large plein-air canvases define the essence of Pennsylvania Impressionism. By 1907, Redfield had perfected his craft and, from this point forward, was creating some of his finest work.
Redfield would once again return to France where he painted a small but important body of work between 1907 and 1908. While there, he received an Honorable Mention from the Paris Salon for one of these canvases. In 1910 he was awarded a Gold Medal at the prestigious Buenos Aires Exposition and at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco, an entire gallery was dedicated for twenty-one of his paintings.
Since Redfield painted for Exhibition with the intent to win medals, his best effort often went into his larger paintings. Although he also painted many fine smaller pictures, virtually all of his works were of major award-winning canvas sizes of 38x50 or 50x56 inches. If one were to assign a period of Redfield’s work that was representative of his “best period”, it would have to be from 1907 to 1925. Although he was capable of creating masterpieces though the late 1940s, his style fully matured by 1907 and most work from then through the early twenties was of consistently high quality. In the later 1920s and through the 1930s and 1940s, he was like most other great artists, creating some paintings that were superb examples and others that were of more ordinary quality.
Redfield earned an international reputation at a young age, known for accurately recording nature with his canvases and painting virtually all of his work outdoors; Redfield was one of a rare breed. He was regarded as the pioneer of impressionist winter landscape painting in America, having few if any equals. Redfield spent summers in Maine, first at Boothbay Harbor and beginning in the 1920s, on Monhegan Island. There he painted colorful marine and coastal scenes as well as the island’s landscape and fishing shacks. He remained active painting and making Windsor style furniture...
Category
Early 1900s American Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
"Winter Storm, NYC"
By Johann Berthelsen, 1883-1972
Located in Lambertville, NJ
Jim’s of Lambertville Fine Art Gallery is proud to offer this piece by Johann Berthelsen (1883 – 1972).
Born in 1883 in Denmark to artistically inclined parents, Johann Berthelsen would become a widely successful singer, teacher, and painter. After his parents divorced, his mother brought Berthelsen and his siblings with her to the United States in 1890, eventually settling in Wisconsin.
At eighteen, Berthelsen moved to Chicago in the hope of becoming an actor, but a friend at the Chicago Musical College convinced him to audition at his school. Berthelsen received a full scholarship and enrolled at the college, where he was awarded the Gold Medal twice. After graduating, he had an active career traveling across the United States and Canada performing in operas and concerts, before joining the voice faculty at his alma mater in 1910. In 1913, Berthelsen became the voice department director at the Indianapolis Conservatory of Music.
While in Chicago, Berthelsen met the landscape painter, Svend Svendsen...
Category
20th Century American Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil, Canvas
"Snow Squals, Parmelee Farm"
By Peter Poskas
Located in Lambertville, NJ
Signed Lower Left
Poskas was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, a small industrial city set on the banks of the Naugatuck River. He was interested in art as a child, but on entering ...
Category
20th Century American Realist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Two Horses on the Ranch
By Marilyn Mairs
Located in Soquel, CA
Horse portrait by Marilyn Mairs Saunders (American, 20th Century). Unframed. Signed "Marliyn Mairs" lower right. Image size, 18"H x 24"W.
Born in San Francisco, Marilyn Saunders wa...
Category
1980s American Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Strawberries Strewn on a Forest Floor
By William Mason Brown
Located in New York, NY
William Mason Brown was born in Troy, New York, where he studied for several years with local artists, including the leading portraitist there, Abel Buel Moore. In 1850, he moved to ...
Category
19th Century American Realist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
"Forest Strongholds"
By John F. Carlson
Located in Lambertville, NJ
Signed lower right. Complemented by a hand carved and gilt frame.
Exhibited at the National Academy of Design, 1928
Category
20th Century American Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
"The Auction"
By Robert Spencer
Located in Lambertville, NJ
Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork by:
Robert Spencer (1879 - 1931)
One of the rarest and most important artists among the New Hope School, Robert Spencer was bor...
Category
1910s American Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil, Canvas
Previously Available Items
"MANOLETE" THE MOST FAMOUS BULLFIGHTER MEXICO SPAIN MATADOR PORFIRIO SALINAS ART
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Size: 24 x 20
Frame: 30 x 26
Medium: Oil on Canvas
"Manolete" The Bullfighter.
Manuel Laureano Rodríguez Sánchez (4 July 1917 – 29 Aug...
Category
1940s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"SILVERIO" THE BULLFIGHTER / MATADOR MEXICO MEXICAN BY PORFIRIO SALINAS
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 24 x 20
Frame Size: 30 x 26
Medium: Oil on Canvas
"Silverio" The Bullfighter
Silverio Pérez (20 June 1915 — 2 September 20...
Category
1930s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"CACTUS COUNTRY" TEXAS HILL COUNTRY. BLOOMING PRICKLY PEAR PORFIRIO SALINAS
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 24 x 30
Frame Size: 32 x 38
Medium: Oil
"Cactus Country" Prickly Pear in the Texas Hill Country
Biography
Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.
From
the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained
one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works
remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of
the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the
state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become
widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President
Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam
Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives,
and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so
enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be
associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio
Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the
Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are
included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art.
Porfirio
Salinas was born on November 6, 1910 near the small town of Bastrop,
Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas
(1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a
hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to
give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father
was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the
scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of
the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist.
For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently
to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop,
Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of
pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the
middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as
well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of
Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to
Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family.
As a child growing up in
the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted
incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work
that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later
in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose
textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed."
Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching
artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter,
Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the
most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older,
professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to
leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a
professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a
career with any future for his son.
When Salinas was about
fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met
Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to
work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from
Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was
already an established professional artist, he did not have a great
deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the
academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to
augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas
was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San
Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to
sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the
English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills
outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of
fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of
Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they
changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious
work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in
the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a
1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist
Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in
one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint
them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is
accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent
young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long.
The
formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas
Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the
eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of
paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio
from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring,
the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic
Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the
United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis
Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's
reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River
City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the
area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had
already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their
home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held,
more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers
saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state
and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning
paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young
Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors
- Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in
the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take
several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for
"Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still
on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately,
Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable
endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after
they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make
wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist
Texas collectors.
In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas
hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the
sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner
by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young
artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were
settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert
Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small
paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to
see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions. While
a few of his early works have a soft, tonalist quality, with subtle
gradations of sunset colors, most were painted in a style that fits
well within the currents of the late American Impressionist style, with
solid drawing and a warm, chromatic palette. Like Robert Wood's works
of the 1930s, the paintings Salinas produced as a young man were
usually well composed and detailed views of the spring wildflowers in
full bloom in the Texas countryside. In contrast to Wood's work,
however, early Salinas compositions were usually pure landscapes
without the pioneer farms or dilapidated fences that Wood often used to
add visual interest to his wildflower scenes, and he also painted
scenes of San Antonio itself as his mentor Jose Arpa had done. To
residents of the Hill Country, Salinas was especially adept at
accurately capturing the palette of the region and its unique
atmosphere.
In 1939 Salinas began working with Dewey Bradford
(1896-1985), one of the great characters of Texas art. Bradford was a
second-generation dealer whose family operated the Bradford Paint
Company in Austin, where they sold art supplies, framed artwork,
restored paintings and exhibited paintings by Texas artists. Salinas
was struggling when he met Bradford, but the older man took the young
artist under his wing and began to sell his work reliably, even though
the prices that people would pay for a painting were still low due to
the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bradford was a born
salesman with a gift for storytelling, and truth be told, a bit of
embroidery. The relationship between Bradford and Salinas was often
rocky, but it was to last the rest of the artist's life and give him a
modest sense of loyalty and security, things which are all too rare in
the art world. While Bradford could be critical of his work, Salinas
knew that he had a dealer who encouraged him, believed in him and was
not shy about singing his praises to anyone who entered Bradford's
store on Guadalupe Street.
During the early years of World
War II Salinas met a pretty Mexican woman from Guadalajara named Maria
Bonillas, who was working as a secretary for the Mexican National
Railways office in San Antonio. While he was walking downtown with a
painting of a bullfighter under his arm, he started a conversation with
the young woman, and things progressed rapidly. The couple were married
on February 15, 1942 and settled into life in bi-lingual San Antonio
and they eventually purchased a tidy stone home on Buena Vista street
that had a detached studio in back. By the time the United States
entered World War II, Salinas was starting to make a decent living
selling his art and beginning to garner recognition across Texas.
However, in 1943, like millions of other young men, he was drafted into
the service of his country. Fortunately, as an older Army draftee with
special talents, after his training he was assigned to Fort Sam
Houston, right in San Antonio, allowing him to remain at home while
still completing his obligation to "Uncle Sam." Because of his artistic
abilities, Salinas was asked to do paintings for the Army as well as a
mural for the Officer's Club, which has been re-discovered in recent
years. In his spare time he kept working on landscapes and when the war
ended in 1945, he was not faced with the same rocky transition from
military to civilian life as many veterans. That same year, Salinas
became a father as he and Maria celebrated the birth of his only child,
Christina Maria Salinas.
Like most landscape artists of the
era, Salinas was an avid Plein-air painter, and he took his easel and
paint box with him on trips throughout Texas and into Mexico. He and
his wife traveled deep into her native country, where the artist
painted the majestic volcanic peaks of Iztaccihuatl (known as the
"Sleeping Woman" because of its unique shape) and Popocatepetl (called
the "smoking mountain" because the volcano is still active), south of
Mexico City. Salinas also painted studies of rustic villages and their
residents. While his most popular paintings were always the scenes of
the Texas Bluebonnets and other wildflowers that bloom all over the
Hill Country in the spring, he also painted scenes of the twisted Texas
oak trees of central Texas, the more arid landscapes of the Texas
panhandle and West Texas, and the historic Texas missions; he even sold
rapidly executed scenes of bullfights and cockfights for
Mexican-American collectors.
By the late 1940s, the American
economy was finally growing again and wealthier Texans began to collect
Salinas paintings, purchasing them from galleries in San Antonio and
Dallas and at Dewey Bradford's County Store Gallery in Austin. Salinas
also sold work to the Atlanta dealer Dr. Carlton Palmer, who
represented Robert W. Wood for many years. In 1948 Palmer sold two
large Salinas paintings to the Citizen National Bank in Abilene, Texas.
Because Austin was the state capitol, Bradford counted many of the
state's elite among his patrons, and due to his interest in history and
literature, he played a large role in the cultural history of central
Texas. Bradford introduced a number of the major Texas political
figures to Salinas' work, including Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973),
who was then in the House of Representatives and on his way to winning
a controversial election that vaulted him in the United States Senate.
Johnson became an enthusiastic collector, as did his political mentor,
the legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn (1882-1961). Johnson decorated
his Washington offices with Salinas paintings and he brought a number
of them home to his vast LBJ Ranch, near Johnson City, Texas. In spite
of his important patrons, Salinas went through a fallow and difficult
period in the late 1950s. He had a volatile temperament, which made
relationships difficult, and it took great patience for his wife to
help him manage his career.
As Salinas entered middle age his
work began to sell steadily, but except for tourists who purchased his
paintings in San Antonio, he was known primarily only to Texas art
collectors. All that changed in 1961 with the election of John F.
Kennedy (1917-1963) to the Presidency of the United States and his
running mate Lyndon Johnson to the Vice Presidency. Johnson was an
expansive, larger-than-life character and his status as a long, tall
Texan in a cowboy hat was a large part of his imposing political image.
During his storied career in the House of Representatives and the
United States Senate, Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) spent
their time in Washington in a modest house on the edge of Rock Creek
Park, but this home would not do for a Vice President. So, in 1961, the
Johnsons purchased a French chateau-styled home in the Spring Valley
section of the Capitol. Obtained from the famed socialite and
ambassador Perle Mesta (1889-1975), the house came with a fine
collection of French furniture and tapestries, and the designer
Genevieve Hendricks was hired to meld the French look with objects from
the Johnsons' overseas travels and paintings of the flora and fauna of
their native Texas. Featured prominently in the foyer were the
paintings of Porfirio Salinas. Because of the Johnsons' patronage, his
work was mentioned in Time Magazine and other national publications.
Lady Bird Johnson loved her landscapes of the Texas Hill Country and
told reporters that, "I want to see them when ever I open the door, to
remind me where I come from."
After President Kennedy's death
thrust Lyndon Johnson into the Presidency, he brought his Salinas
paintings into the historic halls of the White House, further enhaning
the Texas painter's national reputation. At the time of the President
Kennedy's assassination, Salinas had completed a scene of a horse
drinking titled "Rocky Creek" that was to have been presented to
Kennedy during his ill-fated visit to Dallas. Instead, in an effort to
memorialize the fallen President, Salinas painted a symbolic work of a
lone horse depicted against foreboding clouds. During his tenure in the
White House, President Johnson presented a Salinas landscape as a state
gift to the President of Mexico, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1911-1979). During
the 1960s, Salinas paintings sold briskly and, thanks to Presidential
patronage, for escalating prices. In an interview with a writer from
the New York Times, President Johnson enthused about the work of "his
favorite artist" and said that, "his work reminds me of the country
around the ranch." Salinas was invited to the LBJ Ranch frequently
during the Johnson administration and his paintings were hung
throughout the ranch, in the President's offices and even in the
private quarters of the White House. The connection to President
Johnson was a great boon to sales of Salinas paintings, and in 1964,
when the demand was at its height, Texas Governor John Connelly
(1917-1993) was told that all Salinas'work was sold and that he would
have to wait for a painting.
In 1960, a half century after his
birth, Salinas was honored by his home town of Bastrop, a celebration
that touched the modest artist. In 1962 Salinas was given a solo
exhibition at the Witte Museum in San Antonio that featured more than
twenty of his works. By the early 1960s, sales of reproductions of the
artist's landscapes by the New York Graphic Society and other
publishers grew rapidly, enlarging his audience throughout the United
States. In 1967, Dewey Bradford helped to organize the production of a
book of Texas stories titled "Bluebonnets and Cactus" (Austin:
Pemberton Press: 1967), which was profusely illustrated with paintings
by Salinas. His works were still popular when Salinas died after a
brief illness in April of 1973, just a few months after former
President Johnson's passing. He was memorialized in the City of Austin
by Porfirio Salinas Day, which honored him for having "done much to
bring the culture of Mexico and Texas together with his paintings."
Bastrop, Texas, the city of the artist's birth, has been holding a
Salinas Art Exhibition annually since 1981.
He painted hundreds of scenes of the wildflowers,
including the various varieties of Blue Lupin, the state flower, as
well as other flowering flora. These show the influence of his artistic
mentors Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa Y Perea. Salinas also painted a
number of scenes of Prickly Pear Cactus that show the influence of the
English painter Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939), who painted many such
works during his tenure in Texas. He painted the more arid Texas
landscape infrequently and these works are very rare today and sought
after by collectors from the Texas Panhandle and West Texas. Salinas
also painted many river landscapes along the Guadalupe, Rio Frio, the
San Antonio and the Rio Grande. On trips to his wife's homeland of
Mexico, he painted a number of scenes of the volcanic peaks as well as
scenes of peasant villages and villagers. Figurative paintings are rare
among Salinas' works and these scenes of bullfights, fandangos and cock
fights are probably the least sought after of his paintings. There are
also a small number of modest marines, painted on trips to the Texas
and California coast. Salinas paintings are highly prized by collectors
of early Texas art, with the paintings of wildflowers in greatest
demand.
Works by Porfirio Salinas can be found in a number of
public collections, including the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in
Canyon, Texas; the Texas State Capitol; the Texas Governor's Mansion;
the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch; the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in
Bonham, Texas; Amarillo High School; the Witte Museum in San Antonio;
the historic Joan and Price Daniel House in San Antonio; the Stark
Museum in Orange, Texas; the R.W. Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport,
Louisiana; the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado; Texas
A & M University and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Salinas has been featured in a number of reference works as well as
anthologies devoted to American Western Art...
Category
1950s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"SPRING CREEK" TEXAS HILL COUNTRY. CANVAS 25 X 30 DATED 1951 PORFIRIO SALINAS
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 25 x 30
Frame Size: 33 x 38
Medium: Oil
Dated 1951
"Spring Creek" Texas Hill Country
Biography
Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.
From
the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained
one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works
remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of
the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the
state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become
widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President
Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam
Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives,
and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so
enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be
associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio
Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the
Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are
included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art.
Porfirio
Salinas was born on November 6, 1910 near the small town of Bastrop,
Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas
(1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a
hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to
give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father
was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the
scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of
the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist.
For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently
to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop,
Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of
pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the
middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as
well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of
Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to
Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family.
As a child growing up in
the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted
incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work
that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later
in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose
textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed."
Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching
artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter,
Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the
most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older,
professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to
leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a
professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a
career with any future for his son.
When Salinas was about
fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met
Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to
work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from
Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was
already an established professional artist, he did not have a great
deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the
academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to
augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas
was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San
Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to
sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the
English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills
outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of
fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of
Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they
changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious
work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in
the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a
1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist
Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in
one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint
them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is
accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent
young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long.
The
formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas
Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the
eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of
paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio
from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring,
the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic
Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the
United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis
Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's
reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River
City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the
area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had
already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their
home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held,
more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers
saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state
and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning
paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young
Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors
- Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in
the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take
several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for
"Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still
on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately,
Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable
endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after
they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make
wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist
Texas collectors.
In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas
hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the
sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner
by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young
artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were
settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert
Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small
paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to
see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions. While
a few of his early works have a soft, tonalist quality, with subtle
gradations of sunset colors, most were painted in a style that fits
well within the currents of the late American Impressionist style, with
solid drawing and a warm, chromatic palette. Like Robert Wood's works
of the 1930s, the paintings Salinas produced as a young man were
usually well composed and detailed views of the spring wildflowers in
full bloom in the Texas countryside. In contrast to Wood's work,
however, early Salinas compositions were usually pure landscapes
without the pioneer farms or dilapidated fences that Wood often used to
add visual interest to his wildflower scenes, and he also painted
scenes of San Antonio itself as his mentor Jose Arpa had done. To
residents of the Hill Country, Salinas was especially adept at
accurately capturing the palette of the region and its unique
atmosphere.
In 1939 Salinas began working with Dewey Bradford
(1896-1985), one of the great characters of Texas art. Bradford was a
second-generation dealer whose family operated the Bradford Paint
Company in Austin, where they sold art supplies, framed artwork,
restored paintings and exhibited paintings by Texas artists. Salinas
was struggling when he met Bradford, but the older man took the young
artist under his wing and began to sell his work reliably, even though
the prices that people would pay for a painting were still low due to
the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bradford was a born
salesman with a gift for storytelling, and truth be told, a bit of
embroidery. The relationship between Bradford and Salinas was often
rocky, but it was to last the rest of the artist's life and give him a
modest sense of loyalty and security, things which are all too rare in
the art world. While Bradford could be critical of his work, Salinas
knew that he had a dealer who encouraged him, believed in him and was
not shy about singing his praises to anyone who entered Bradford's
store on Guadalupe Street.
During the early years of World
War II Salinas met a pretty Mexican woman from Guadalajara named Maria
Bonillas, who was working as a secretary for the Mexican National
Railways office in San Antonio. While he was walking downtown with a
painting of a bullfighter under his arm, he started a conversation with
the young woman, and things progressed rapidly. The couple were married
on February 15, 1942 and settled into life in bi-lingual San Antonio
and they eventually purchased a tidy stone home on Buena Vista street
that had a detached studio in back. By the time the United States
entered World War II, Salinas was starting to make a decent living
selling his art and beginning to garner recognition across Texas.
However, in 1943, like millions of other young men, he was drafted into
the service of his country. Fortunately, as an older Army draftee with
special talents, after his training he was assigned to Fort Sam
Houston, right in San Antonio, allowing him to remain at home while
still completing his obligation to "Uncle Sam." Because of his artistic
abilities, Salinas was asked to do paintings for the Army as well as a
mural for the Officer's Club, which has been re-discovered in recent
years. In his spare time he kept working on landscapes and when the war
ended in 1945, he was not faced with the same rocky transition from
military to civilian life as many veterans. That same year, Salinas
became a father as he and Maria celebrated the birth of his only child,
Christina Maria Salinas.
Like most landscape artists of the
era, Salinas was an avid Plein-air painter, and he took his easel and
paint box with him on trips throughout Texas and into Mexico. He and
his wife traveled deep into her native country, where the artist
painted the majestic volcanic peaks of Iztaccihuatl (known as the
"Sleeping Woman" because of its unique shape) and Popocatepetl (called
the "smoking mountain" because the volcano is still active), south of
Mexico City. Salinas also painted studies of rustic villages and their
residents. While his most popular paintings were always the scenes of
the Texas Bluebonnets and other wildflowers that bloom all over the
Hill Country in the spring, he also painted scenes of the twisted Texas
oak trees of central Texas, the more arid landscapes of the Texas
panhandle and West Texas, and the historic Texas missions; he even sold
rapidly executed scenes of bullfights and cockfights for
Mexican-American collectors.
By the late 1940s, the American
economy was finally growing again and wealthier Texans began to collect
Salinas paintings, purchasing them from galleries in San Antonio and
Dallas and at Dewey Bradford's County Store Gallery in Austin. Salinas
also sold work to the Atlanta dealer Dr. Carlton Palmer, who
represented Robert W. Wood for many years. In 1948 Palmer sold two
large Salinas paintings to the Citizen National Bank in Abilene, Texas.
Because Austin was the state capitol, Bradford counted many of the
state's elite among his patrons, and due to his interest in history and
literature, he played a large role in the cultural history of central
Texas. Bradford introduced a number of the major Texas political
figures to Salinas' work, including Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973),
who was then in the House of Representatives and on his way to winning
a controversial election that vaulted him in the United States Senate.
Johnson became an enthusiastic collector, as did his political mentor,
the legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn (1882-1961). Johnson decorated
his Washington offices with Salinas paintings and he brought a number
of them home to his vast LBJ Ranch, near Johnson City, Texas. In spite
of his important patrons, Salinas went through a fallow and difficult
period in the late 1950s. He had a volatile temperament, which made
relationships difficult, and it took great patience for his wife to
help him manage his career.
As Salinas entered middle age his
work began to sell steadily, but except for tourists who purchased his
paintings in San Antonio, he was known primarily only to Texas art
collectors. All that changed in 1961 with the election of John F.
Kennedy (1917-1963) to the Presidency of the United States and his
running mate Lyndon Johnson to the Vice Presidency. Johnson was an
expansive, larger-than-life character and his status as a long, tall
Texan in a cowboy hat was a large part of his imposing political image.
During his storied career in the House of Representatives and the
United States Senate, Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) spent
their time in Washington in a modest house on the edge of Rock Creek
Park, but this home would not do for a Vice President. So, in 1961, the
Johnsons purchased a French chateau-styled home in the Spring Valley
section of the Capitol. Obtained from the famed socialite and
ambassador Perle Mesta (1889-1975), the house came with a fine
collection of French furniture and tapestries, and the designer
Genevieve Hendricks was hired to meld the French look with objects from
the Johnsons' overseas travels and paintings of the flora and fauna of
their native Texas. Featured prominently in the foyer were the
paintings of Porfirio Salinas. Because of the Johnsons' patronage, his
work was mentioned in Time Magazine and other national publications.
Lady Bird Johnson loved her landscapes of the Texas Hill Country and
told reporters that, "I want to see them when ever I open the door, to
remind me where I come from."
After President Kennedy's death
thrust Lyndon Johnson into the Presidency, he brought his Salinas
paintings into the historic halls of the White House, further enhaning
the Texas painter's national reputation. At the time of the President
Kennedy's assassination, Salinas had completed a scene of a horse
drinking titled "Rocky Creek" that was to have been presented to
Kennedy during his ill-fated visit to Dallas. Instead, in an effort to
memorialize the fallen President, Salinas painted a symbolic work of a
lone horse depicted against foreboding clouds. During his tenure in the
White House, President Johnson presented a Salinas landscape as a state
gift to the President of Mexico, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1911-1979). During
the 1960s, Salinas paintings sold briskly and, thanks to Presidential
patronage, for escalating prices. In an interview with a writer from
the New York Times, President Johnson enthused about the work of "his
favorite artist" and said that, "his work reminds me of the country
around the ranch." Salinas was invited to the LBJ Ranch frequently
during the Johnson administration and his paintings were hung
throughout the ranch, in the President's offices and even in the
private quarters of the White House. The connection to President
Johnson was a great boon to sales of Salinas paintings, and in 1964,
when the demand was at its height, Texas Governor John Connelly
(1917-1993) was told that all Salinas'work was sold and that he would
have to wait for a painting.
In 1960, a half century after his
birth, Salinas was honored by his home town of Bastrop, a celebration
that touched the modest artist. In 1962 Salinas was given a solo
exhibition at the Witte Museum in San Antonio that featured more than
twenty of his works. By the early 1960s, sales of reproductions of the
artist's landscapes by the New York Graphic Society and other
publishers grew rapidly, enlarging his audience throughout the United
States. In 1967, Dewey Bradford helped to organize the production of a
book of Texas stories titled "Bluebonnets and Cactus" (Austin:
Pemberton Press: 1967), which was profusely illustrated with paintings
by Salinas. His works were still popular when Salinas died after a
brief illness in April of 1973, just a few months after former
President Johnson's passing. He was memorialized in the City of Austin
by Porfirio Salinas Day, which honored him for having "done much to
bring the culture of Mexico and Texas together with his paintings."
Bastrop, Texas, the city of the artist's birth, has been holding a
Salinas Art Exhibition annually since 1981.
He painted hundreds of scenes of the wildflowers,
including the various varieties of Blue Lupin, the state flower, as
well as other flowering flora. These show the influence of his artistic
mentors Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa Y Perea. Salinas also painted a
number of scenes of Prickly Pear Cactus that show the influence of the
English painter Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939), who painted many such
works during his tenure in Texas. He painted the more arid Texas
landscape infrequently and these works are very rare today and sought
after by collectors from the Texas Panhandle and West Texas. Salinas
also painted many river landscapes along the Guadalupe, Rio Frio, the
San Antonio and the Rio Grande. On trips to his wife's homeland of
Mexico, he painted a number of scenes of the volcanic peaks as well as
scenes of peasant villages and villagers. Figurative paintings are rare
among Salinas' works and these scenes of bullfights, fandangos and cock
fights are probably the least sought after of his paintings. There are
also a small number of modest marines, painted on trips to the Texas
and California coast. Salinas paintings are highly prized by collectors
of early Texas art, with the paintings of wildflowers in greatest
demand.
Works by Porfirio Salinas can be found in a number of
public collections, including the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in
Canyon, Texas; the Texas State Capitol; the Texas Governor's Mansion;
the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch; the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in
Bonham, Texas; Amarillo High School; the Witte Museum in San Antonio;
the historic Joan and Price Daniel House in San Antonio; the Stark
Museum in Orange, Texas; the R.W. Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport,
Louisiana; the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado; Texas
A & M University and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Salinas has been featured in a number of reference works as well as
anthologies devoted to American Western Art...
Category
1950s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"Bluebonnets & Paintbrush" Texas Hill Country Image: 16x20 Frame: 24 x 28
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 16 x 20
Frame Size: 24 x 28
Medium: Oil
"Bluebonnets & Paintbrush" Texas Hill Country
Biography
Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officers lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.
From
the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained
one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works
remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of
the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the
state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become
widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President
Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam
Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives,
and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so
enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be
associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio
Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the
Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are
included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art.
Porfirio
Salinas was born on November 6, 1910 near the small town of Bastrop,
Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas
(1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a
hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to
give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father
was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the
scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of
the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist.
For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently
to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop,
Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of
pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the
middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as
well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of
Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to
Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family.
As a child growing up in
the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted
incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work
that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later
in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose
textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed."
Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching
artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter,
Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the
most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older,
professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to
leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a
professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a
career with any future for his son.
When Salinas was about
fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met
Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to
work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from
Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was
already an established professional artist, he did not have a great
deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the
academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to
augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas
was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San
Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to
sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the
English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills
outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of
fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of
Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they
changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious
work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in
the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a
1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist
Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in
one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint
them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is
accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent
young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long.
The
formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas
Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the
eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of
paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio
from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring,
the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic
Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the
United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis
Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's
reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River
City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the
area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had
already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their
home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held,
more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers
saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state
and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning
paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young
Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors
- Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in
the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take
several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for
"Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still
on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately,
Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable
endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after
they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make
wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist
Texas collectors.
In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas
hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the
sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner
by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young
artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were
settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert
Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small
paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to
see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions. While
a few of his early works have a soft, tonalist quality, with subtle
gradations of sunset colors, most were painted in a style that fits
well within the currents of the late American Impressionist style, with
solid drawing and a warm, chromatic palette. Like Robert Wood's works
of the 1930s, the paintings Salinas produced as a young man were
usually well composed and detailed views of the spring wildflowers in
full bloom in the Texas countryside. In contrast to Wood's work,
however, early Salinas compositions were usually pure landscapes
without the pioneer farms or dilapidated fences that Wood often used to
add visual interest to his wildflower scenes, and he also painted
scenes of San Antonio itself as his mentor Jose Arpa had done. To
residents of the Hill Country, Salinas was especially adept at
accurately capturing the palette of the region and its unique
atmosphere.
In 1939 Salinas began working with Dewey Bradford
(1896-1985), one of the great characters of Texas art. Bradford was a
second-generation dealer whose family operated the Bradford Paint
Company in Austin, where they sold art supplies, framed artwork,
restored paintings and exhibited paintings by Texas artists. Salinas
was struggling when he met Bradford, but the older man took the young
artist under his wing and began to sell his work reliably, even though
the prices that people would pay for a painting were still low due to
the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bradford was a born
salesman with a gift for storytelling, and truth be told, a bit of
embroidery. The relationship between Bradford and Salinas was often
rocky, but it was to last the rest of the artist's life and give him a
modest sense of loyalty and security, things which are all too rare in
the art world. While Bradford could be critical of his work, Salinas
knew that he had a dealer who encouraged him, believed in him and was
not shy about singing his praises to anyone who entered Bradford's
store on Guadalupe Street.
During the early years of World
War II Salinas met a pretty Mexican woman from Guadalajara named Maria
Bonillas, who was working as a secretary for the Mexican National
Railways office in San Antonio. While he was walking downtown with a
painting of a bullfighter under his arm, he started a conversation with
the young woman, and things progressed rapidly. The couple were married
on February 15, 1942 and settled into life in bi-lingual San Antonio
and they eventually purchased a tidy stone home on Buena Vista street
that had a detached studio in back. By the time the United States
entered World War II, Salinas was starting to make a decent living
selling his art and beginning to garner recognition across Texas.
However, in 1943, like millions of other young men, he was drafted into
the service of his country. Fortunately, as an older Army draftee with
special talents, after his training he was assigned to Fort Sam
Houston, right in San Antonio, allowing him to remain at home while
still completing his obligation to "Uncle Sam." Because of his artistic
abilities, Salinas was asked to do paintings for the Army as well as a
mural for the Officer's Club, which has been re-discovered in recent
years. In his spare time he kept working on landscapes and when the war
ended in 1945, he was not faced with the same rocky transition from
military to civilian life as many veterans. That same year, Salinas
became a father as he and Maria celebrated the birth of his only child,
Christina Maria Salinas.
Like most landscape artists of the
era, Salinas was an avid Plein-air painter, and he took his easel and
paint box with him on trips throughout Texas and into Mexico. He and
his wife traveled deep into her native country, where the artist
painted the majestic volcanic peaks of Iztaccihuatl (known as the
"Sleeping Woman" because of its unique shape) and Popocatepetl (called
the "smoking mountain" because the volcano is still active), south of
Mexico City. Salinas also painted studies of rustic villages and their
residents. While his most popular paintings were always the scenes of
the Texas Bluebonnets and other wildflowers that bloom all over the
Hill Country in the spring, he also painted scenes of the twisted Texas
oak trees of central Texas, the more arid landscapes of the Texas
panhandle and West Texas, and the historic Texas missions; he even sold
rapidly executed scenes of bullfights and cockfights for
Mexican-American collectors.
By the late 1940s, the American
economy was finally growing again and wealthier Texans began to collect
Salinas paintings, purchasing them from galleries in San Antonio and
Dallas and at Dewey Bradford's County Store Gallery in Austin. Salinas
also sold work to the Atlanta dealer...
Category
1950s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"BIG OAK BLUES" TEXAS HILL COUNTRY BLUEBONNETS 24 X 36 1957
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 24 x 36
Frame Size: 31 x 43
Medium: Oil
Dated 1957
"Big Oak Blues" Texas Hill Country Bluebonnets
Biography
Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officers lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.
From
the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained
one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works
remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of
the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the
state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become
widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President
Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam
Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives,
and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson...
Category
1950s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"PRICKLY PEAR IN BLUE" TEXAS HILL COUNTRY BLUEBONNETS CACTUS 34 x 46 FRAMED
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 24 x 36
Frame Size: 34 x 46
Medium: Oil
Circa Early 1950s
"Prickly Pear in Blue" Texas Hill Country
Biography
Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officers lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.
From
the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained
one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works
remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of
the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the
state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become
widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President
Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam
Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives,
and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so
enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be
associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio
Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the
Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are
included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art.
Porfirio
Salinas was born on November 6, 1910 near the small town of Bastrop,
Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas
(1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a
hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to
give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father
was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the
scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of
the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist.
For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently
to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop,
Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of
pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the
middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as
well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of
Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to
Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family.
As a child growing up in
the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted
incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work
that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later
in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose
textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed."
Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching
artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter,
Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the
most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older,
professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to
leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a
professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a
career with any future for his son.
When Salinas was about
fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met
Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to
work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from
Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was
already an established professional artist, he did not have a great
deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the
academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to
augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas
was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San
Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to
sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the
English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills
outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of
fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of
Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they
changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious
work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in
the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a
1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist
Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in
one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint
them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is
accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent
young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long.
The
formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas
Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the
eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of
paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio
from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring,
the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic
Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the
United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis
Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's
reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River
City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the
area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had
already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their
home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held,
more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers
saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state
and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning
paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young
Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors
- Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in
the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take
several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for
"Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still
on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately,
Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable
endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after
they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make
wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist
Texas collectors.
In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas
hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the
sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner
by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young
artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were
settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert
Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small
paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to
see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions. While
a few of his early works have a soft, tonalist quality, with subtle
gradations of sunset colors, most were painted in a style that fits
well within the currents of the late American Impressionist style, with
solid drawing and a warm, chromatic palette. Like Robert Wood's works
of the 1930s, the paintings Salinas produced as a young man were
usually well composed and detailed views of the spring wildflowers in
full bloom in the Texas countryside. In contrast to Wood's work,
however, early Salinas compositions were usually pure landscapes
without the pioneer farms or dilapidated fences that Wood often used to
add visual interest to his wildflower scenes, and he also painted
scenes of San Antonio itself as his mentor Jose Arpa had done. To
residents of the Hill Country, Salinas was especially adept at
accurately capturing the palette of the region and its unique
atmosphere.
In 1939 Salinas began working with Dewey Bradford
(1896-1985), one of the great characters of Texas art. Bradford was a
second-generation dealer whose family operated the Bradford Paint
Company in Austin, where they sold art supplies, framed artwork,
restored paintings and exhibited paintings by Texas artists. Salinas
was struggling when he met Bradford, but the older man took the young
artist under his wing and began to sell his work reliably, even though
the prices that people would pay for a painting were still low due to
the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bradford was a born
salesman with a gift for storytelling, and truth be told, a bit of
embroidery. The relationship between Bradford and Salinas was often
rocky, but it was to last the rest of the artist's life and give him a
modest sense of loyalty and security, things which are all too rare in
the art world. While Bradford could be critical of his work, Salinas
knew that he had a dealer who encouraged him, believed in him and was
not shy about singing his praises to anyone who entered Bradford's
store on Guadalupe Street.
During the early years of World
War II Salinas met a pretty Mexican woman from Guadalajara named Maria
Bonillas, who was working as a secretary for the Mexican National
Railways office in San Antonio. While he was walking downtown with a
painting of a bullfighter under his arm, he started a conversation with
the young woman, and things progressed rapidly. The couple were married
on February 15, 1942 and settled into life in bi-lingual San Antonio
and they eventually purchased a tidy stone home on Buena Vista street
that had a detached studio in back. By the time the United States
entered World War II, Salinas was starting to make a decent living
selling his art and beginning to garner recognition across Texas.
However, in 1943, like millions of other young men, he was drafted into
the service of his country. Fortunately, as an older Army draftee with
special talents, after his training he was assigned to Fort Sam
Houston, right in San Antonio, allowing him to remain at home while
still completing his obligation to "Uncle Sam." Because of his artistic
abilities, Salinas was asked to do paintings for the Army as well as a
mural for the Officer's Club, which has been re-discovered in recent
years. In his spare time he kept working on landscapes and when the war
ended in 1945, he was not faced with the same rocky transition from
military to civilian life as many veterans. That same year, Salinas
became a father as he and Maria celebrated the birth of his only child,
Christina Maria Salinas.
Like most landscape artists of the
era, Salinas was an avid Plein-air painter, and he took his easel and
paint box with him on trips throughout Texas and into Mexico. He and
his wife traveled deep into her native country, where the artist
painted the majestic volcanic peaks of Iztaccihuatl (known as the
"Sleeping Woman" because of its unique shape) and Popocatepetl (called
the "smoking mountain" because the volcano is still active), south of
Mexico City. Salinas also painted studies of rustic villages and their
residents. While his most popular paintings were always the scenes of
the Texas Bluebonnets and other wildflowers that bloom all over the
Hill Country in the spring, he also painted scenes of the twisted Texas
oak trees of central Texas, the more arid landscapes of the Texas
panhandle and West Texas, and the historic Texas missions; he even sold
rapidly executed scenes of bullfights and cockfights for
Mexican-American collectors.
By the late 1940s, the American
economy was finally growing again and wealthier Texans began to collect
Salinas paintings, purchasing them from galleries in San Antonio and
Dallas and at Dewey Bradford's County Store Gallery in Austin. Salinas
also sold work to the Atlanta dealer...
Category
1950s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"Blue Ridge" Texas Hill Country Wildflowers Bluebonnets 36 x 41 Framed
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 25 x 30
Frame Size: 36 x 41
Medium: Oil
Circa early 1950s
"Blue Ridge" Bluebonnet
Biography
Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973)
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officers lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.
From
the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained
one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works
remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of
the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the
state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become
widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President
Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam
Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives,
and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so
enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be
associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio
Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the
Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are
included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art.
Porfirio
Salinas was born on November 6, 1910 near the small town of Bastrop,
Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas
(1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a
hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to
give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father
was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the
scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of
the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist.
For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently
to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop,
Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of
pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the
middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as
well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of
Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to
Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family.
As a child growing up in
the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted
incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work
that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later
in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose
textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed."
Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching
artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter,
Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the
most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older,
professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to
leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a
professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a
career with any future for his son.
When Salinas was about
fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met
Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to
work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from
Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was
already an established professional artist, he did not have a great
deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the
academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to
augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas
was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San
Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to
sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the
English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills
outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of
fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of
Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they
changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious
work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in
the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a
1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist
Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in
one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint
them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is
accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent
young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long.
The
formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas
Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the
eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of
paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio
from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring,
the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic
Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the
United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis
Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's
reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River
City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the
area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had
already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their
home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held,
more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers
saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state
and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning
paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young
Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors
- Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in
the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take
several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for
"Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still
on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately,
Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable
endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after
they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make
wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist
Texas collectors.
In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas
hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the
sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner
by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young
artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were
settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert
Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small
paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to
see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions. While
a few of his early works have a soft, tonalist quality, with subtle
gradations of sunset colors, most were painted in a style that fits
well within the currents of the late American Impressionist style, with
solid drawing and a warm, chromatic palette. Like Robert Wood's works
of the 1930s, the paintings Salinas produced as a young man were
usually well composed and detailed views of the spring wildflowers in
full bloom in the Texas countryside. In contrast to Wood's work,
however, early Salinas compositions were usually pure landscapes
without the pioneer farms or dilapidated fences that Wood often used to
add visual interest to his wildflower scenes, and he also painted
scenes of San Antonio itself as his mentor Jose Arpa had done. To
residents of the Hill Country, Salinas was especially adept at
accurately capturing the palette of the region and its unique
atmosphere.
In 1939 Salinas began working with Dewey Bradford
(1896-1985), one of the great characters of Texas art. Bradford was a
second-generation dealer whose family operated the Bradford Paint
Company in Austin, where they sold art supplies, framed artwork,
restored paintings and exhibited paintings by Texas artists. Salinas
was struggling when he met Bradford, but the older man took the young
artist under his wing and began to sell his work reliably, even though
the prices that people would pay for a painting were still low due to
the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bradford was a born
salesman with a gift for storytelling, and truth be told, a bit of
embroidery. The relationship between Bradford and Salinas was often
rocky, but it was to last the rest of the artist's life and give him a
modest sense of loyalty and security, things which are all too rare in
the art world. While Bradford could be critical of his work, Salinas
knew that he had a dealer who encouraged him, believed in him and was
not shy about singing his praises to anyone who entered Bradford's
store on Guadalupe Street.
During the early years of World
War II Salinas met a pretty Mexican woman from Guadalajara named Maria
Bonillas, who was working as a secretary for the Mexican National
Railways office in San Antonio. While he was walking downtown with a
painting of a bullfighter under his arm, he started a conversation with
the young woman, and things progressed rapidly. The couple were married
on February 15, 1942 and settled into life in bi-lingual San Antonio
and they eventually purchased a tidy stone home on Buena Vista street
that had a detached studio in back. By the time the United States
entered World War II, Salinas was starting to make a decent living
selling his art and beginning to garner recognition across Texas.
However, in 1943, like millions of other young men, he was drafted into
the service of his country. Fortunately, as an older Army draftee with
special talents, after his training he was assigned to Fort Sam
Houston, right in San Antonio, allowing him to remain at home while
still completing his obligation to "Uncle Sam." Because of his artistic
abilities, Salinas was asked to do paintings for the Army as well as a
mural for the Officer's Club, which has been re-discovered in recent
years. In his spare time he kept working on landscapes and when the war
ended in 1945, he was not faced with the same rocky transition from
military to civilian life as many veterans. That same year, Salinas
became a father as he and Maria celebrated the birth of his only child,
Christina Maria Salinas.
Like most landscape artists of the
era, Salinas was an avid Plein-air painter, and he took his easel and
paint box with him on trips throughout Texas and into Mexico. He and
his wife traveled deep into her native country, where the artist
painted the majestic volcanic peaks of Iztaccihuatl (known as the
"Sleeping Woman" because of its unique shape) and Popocatepetl (called
the "smoking mountain" because the volcano is still active), south of
Mexico City. Salinas also painted studies of rustic villages and their
residents. While his most popular paintings were always the scenes of
the Texas Bluebonnets and other wildflowers that bloom all over the
Hill Country in the spring, he also painted scenes of the twisted Texas
oak trees of central Texas, the more arid landscapes of the Texas
panhandle and West Texas, and the historic Texas missions; he even sold
rapidly executed scenes of bullfights and cockfights for
Mexican-American collectors.
By the late 1940s, the American
economy was finally growing again and wealthier Texans began to collect
Salinas paintings, purchasing them from galleries in San Antonio and
Dallas and at Dewey Bradford's County Store Gallery in Austin. Salinas
also sold work to the Atlanta dealer...
Category
1950s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
Fall Pastoral Landscape
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in Austin, TX
"Fall Pastoral Landscape"
Artist: Porfirio Salinas
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 12" x 9"
Antique Gilt Wood Frame
Category
Mid-20th Century Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Spring Pastoral Landscape w/ Bluebonnets
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in Austin, TX
"Spring Pastoral Landscape w/ Bluebonnets"
Artist: Porfirio Salinas
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 11" x 9" (not including frame)
A prime example of Porfirio Salina's landscapes that c...
Category
Mid-20th Century American Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
"VERBENA & COREOPSIS" TEXAS HILL COUNTRY WILDFLOWERS
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 12 x 16
Frame Size: 18 x 22
Medium: Oil
Circa 1950s
"Verbena & Coreopsis" Texas Hill Country Wildflowers
Porfirio Salinas ...
Category
1950s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
"MOUNTAIN SHACKS" WEST TEXAS OR POSSIBLY MEXICO
By Porfirio Salinas
Located in San Antonio, TX
Porfirio Salinas
(1910-1973)
San Antonio Artist
Image Size: 20 x 24
Frame Size: 26.5 x 30.5
Medium: Oil
Circa early 1950s
"Mountain Shacks"
Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist ...
Category
1940s Impressionist Porfirio Salinas Art
Materials
Oil
Porfirio Salinas art for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic Porfirio Salinas art available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Porfirio Salinas in oil paint, paint, canvas and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the Impressionist style. Not every interior allows for large Porfirio Salinas art, so small editions measuring 16 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Aldro Thompson Hibbard, Alexander Farnham, and Henry Bayley Snell. Porfirio Salinas art prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $10,370 and tops out at $29,500, while the average work can sell for $17,400.