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Alaska's most widely beloved historical painter, Sydney Laurence was the first professionally trained artist to make Alaska his home. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1865, and studied at the Art Students League in New York and exhibited regularly in that city by the late 1880's.

Settling in 1889 in the English artists' colony of St. Ives, Cornwall, over the next decade he exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists and was included in the Paris Salon in 1890, 1894, and 1895, winning an award in 1894.

Laurence moved to Alaska in 1904 for reasons still unknown. Living the hard life of the pioneer prospector, he painted little in his first years in the territory, but between 1911 and 1914 he began to focus once again on his art. He moved from Valdez to the budding town of Anchorage in 1915 and by 1920 was Alaska's most prominent painter.

Laurence painted a variety of Alaskan scenes in his long and prolific career, among them sailing ships and steamships in Alaskan waters, totem poles in Southeast Alaska, dramatic headlands and the quiet coves and streams of Cook Inlet, cabins and caches under the northern lights, and Native Alaskans, miners, and trappers engaged in their often solitary lives in the northern wilderness.

But the image of Mt. McKinley from the hills above the rapids of the Tokositna River became his trademark. It is this image more than any other which personifies Laurence for his many admirers and collectors in Alaska and beyond.

Laurence forged a uniquely personal style by applying the tonalist techniques he had learned in New York and Europe to the wilderness of the North. He, more than any other artist, defined for Alaskans and others the image of Alaska as "The Last Frontier."

For an artist of Sydney Laurence’s stature, the abundance of misinformation and altered history is astonishing. Following are a few examples of popular myths with corrections, more or less chronologically listed.
Statement:
"As a teenage boy, Laurence ran off to sea, was shipwrecked and saved the captain’s life". Even the Seattle Sunday Times of August 5, 1934 includes a piece about Laurence stowing away in 1881 at age 16 aboard the brigantine "Edmund Yates". The story continues that Laurence’s father, upon learning of the escapade, instructed the vessel’s captain to keep the boy aboard until the ship returned to New York.

Facts:
a) Laurence was a student at Peekskill Military Academy at least until age 17 and appears in the February 1883 edition of the of the school newspaper.
b) Laurence’s father, Edward, died on January 13, 1882.
c) After thorough research, no ship of the above name is found in Lloyds registry, U. S. Coast Guard lists, historical societies, libraries nor any of the common lists of ships’ names and histories.

Statement:
"Laurence studied at the NAD school with Edward Moran".

Facts:
a) There is no record at the National Academy of Design of Sydney Laurence having been a student. During the 1882-1883 school year, Sydney’s future wife, Alexandrina Fredericka Dupre was a paying student. She continued there through the 1885 school year.
b) Edward Moran was not an instructor at the NAD. Moran was an Associate National Academician and the instructors were all full academicians.
c) Between 1882 and 1889, Edward Moran was living in South Brooklyn and in New York City. Sydney lived with his mother on East 64th and later on West 56th. His studios were on East 23rd and West 57th and there is a reasonable possibility that Laurence took private instruction from Moran during this period since they were both in Manhattan.
d) Laurence did exhibit at the NAD in 1888, 1889 and 1898, as did his mother in 1892 and his wife in 1889 and 1892. Laurence was a registered student at the Art Students League in 1888-89.
Statement:
"In 1889, Laurence traveled to Paris to attend the French Academy", or "This was followed by a move to Paris in 1889 and further studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts".

Facts:
a) On May 18, 1889, Sydney Mortimer Laurence and Alexandrina Fredericka Dupre were married at Zion Church, Madison and East 38th in NYC. On May 22, the couple sailed for England "to pass the summer on the Coast of Cornwall, England". They stayed much longer. Alexandrina lived most of the rest of her life in England. Sydney lived there until he went to Alaska in 1904.
b) Neither Sydney nor Alexandrina were students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, nor did they live in Paris. Their honeymoon trip may have included a trip to Paris to visit the Eiffel Tower, built for the Paris World’s Fair in 1889. They spent the first year of their marriage, however, painting at St. Ives. Both exhibited at the May 1890 Paris Salon and Sydney at the Royal Society of British Artists.


Statement:
"Evidently the lure of wealth influenced him to make a sudden career change, for in 1903 he arrived in Juneau, Alaska", and, "After returning to England in 1903, Laurence’s thirst for adventure took him to Alaska, where he searched for gold in Valdez from 1904-1912".

Facts:
1903 is a difficult year to positively locate Laurence but the preponderance of evidence suggests he went to Alaska. Laurence’s wife and two young sons sent their Christmas 1904 greetings to him at Tyonek. Tyonek is on the NW shore of Cook Inlet, nearly 200 miles from Valdez and much further from Juneau. Most of Laurence’s prospecting and recorded mining claims were in the Dutch Hills, between Tyonek and Mt. McKinley and near Cordova, but not in Valdez nor Juneau.

Statement:
"It was not until 1912 that he resumed his painting career", and "Unsuccessful in his quest, he returned to painting in 1912".

Facts:
There are dated paintings by Sydney Laurence for every year from 1905 through 1911 and beyond. Many of these were exhibited in the large traveling retrospective in 1990-1991 and illustrated in the accompanying exhibition catalog "Sydney Laurence, Painter of the North" by Kesler Woodward.
Statement:
"In the interim, in 1908, he spent time in the Pacific Northwest, helping to establish the Western Academy of Beaux Arts in Seattle. This arts and crafts school later moved to the town of Bellevue and became a short-lived art colony".

Facts:
a) H. W. Nagley, the storekeeper at Susitna Station, near Tyonek wrote on the back of a Laurence watercolor that Laurence was living at Tyonek in 1907, and that in 1908, he went to the Tokositna Glacier and the Poorman Hills. These two locations afford wonderful views of Mt. McKinley.
b) Later in 1908, Laurence was in Cordova, substantiated by several individuals and paintings. In 1909, he completed a commission for E. A. Hegg, a 4-foot by 16-foot panorama of the Cordova waterfront, Lake Eyak and the Copper River flats.
c) No evidence exists of Laurence traveling to Seattle in 1908. The community of Beaux Arts was founded by Frank Calvert and Alfred Renfro. They bought 50 acres on the eastern shore of Lake Washington, platted into half-acre home sites. Ten acres were set aside to be used for art studios. Beaux Arts was incorporated as a town in 1954, one year after Bellevue. It has its own mayor and town council. The ten acre set-aside had been long platted into home sites since the dream of an artists’ colony never came to fruition. No evidence of Laurence’s involvement is known and his involvement appears implausible.

Statement:
"It was while in Valdez that Laurence heard about Mt. McKinley so he journeyed there by steamer and dogsled. By 1914 he had finished an eight-foot canvas titled "Top of the Continent", which was his first finished view of Mt. McKinley".

Facts:
a) On June 12, 1906, Sydney Laurence established a claim on Poorman Creek. On August 27, he filed that claim in the Talkeetna recording district along with a claim on Ramsdyke Creek on behalf of his friend, Durrell Finch. Both Poorman Creek and Ramsdyke Creek are tributaries of the Tokositna River. Of the hundreds of Mt. McKinley paintings by Laurence, very few do not show the Tokositna River. While Mt. McKinley is in the clouds frequently, it is beyond belief that an artist working as a miner at the base of the tallest mountain in North America would not learn of its existence until eight years later.
b) The Knapp Company, a division of American Lithographic Co., produced a 1913 calendar with a chromolithograph from a Sydney Laurence Mt. McKinley painting. The original oil, 36 x 54, is in a private Anchorage collection. Although undated, it cannot have been painted later than 1912, and likely in 1911, in order to have been reproduced in New York for the 1913 calendar.
It is obvious that "Top of the Continent" was not Laurence’s "first finished view of Mt. McKinley" and likely also that the large calendar image wasn’t either. It is impossible to believe that an artist who was a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and the Salmagundi Club; who produced dated oils each year from 1905 on, would not paint a 20,000-foot plus mountain which he saw almost daily.

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