Autumn Gold

This is a painting by Kaysville's famous landscape artist LeConte Stewart (1891-1990) titled "Autumn's Gold, Harvey's Pond" and was done in the early 1920's featuring Baer Canyon in Fruit Heights.  For obvious reasons this is one of my favorite paintings.  Perhaps some lucky day you'll see it in my home.  Maybe.

This past weekend when the mountain colors were so stunning I wondered if it would be possible to digitally recapture Autumn Gold. Harvey's Pond no longer exists; it was drained and filled in during the Cherry Hill interchange reconstruction several years ago to make way for a frontage road between Farmington and Fruit Heights.    

By the time we got out of church the sunny blue skies with fluffy white clouds had turned to overcast gray storm clouds and the brilliant colors dulled a little by the lack of sunlight. Unfortunately I had only my memory to recall the image on the painting and since there was nowhere to park I was lucky it was a low-traffic Sunday. I stopped in the road and quickly took a few snapshots hoping to finish before some car came careening along.  Whew, made it.

Probably not the best picture taking, but after I got home figured all things considered it wasn't too bad a comparison in the 80+ years between the two images: a professional artist's perspective and an inexpensive digital camera. So, what do you think?

A postscript to this blog post:

This painting hangs in one of our building's conference rooms and years ago, during a long string of meetings over many weeks in that room, I really liked the painting and would leave each time thinking "that picture looks familiar" but just couldn't put my finger on it.  One day the more I looked at it the more it looked like Bear Canyon (yes, this is the correct spelling of Bear) from the south end of town.  Afterward I got a closer look to discover the artist signature was LeConte Stewart and started doing my homework to confirm my suspicions.  As part of that search I was even more surprised to learn that Distribution Services offers this as a Giclée print so people can have it framed in their own choice of matte and frame.  It's available in 3 different sizes and prices.