{"id":24455,"date":"2014-01-06T23:45:58","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T05:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=24455"},"modified":"2025-11-08T15:13:00","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T22:13:00","slug":"alfred-lambournes-great-salt-lake-at-the-umfa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/alfred-lambournes-great-salt-lake-at-the-umfa\/","title":{"rendered":"Alfred Lambourne’s Great Salt Lake at the UMFA"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The nineteenth-century Utah artist Alfred Lambourne (1850-1926) loved Great Salt Lake. Nestled within a basin, the body of water he referred to as his \u201cinland sea\u201d was his source of adventure and joy, his faithful companion and as such, his preferred place for solitude. His relationship with the lake spanned decades, resulting in a body of work that rivaled and sometimes surpassed his contemporaries. Lambourne\u2019s body of work was varied, as he sketched and painted the lake from multiple vantage points. At the same time, his paintings focused on his favorite aspects of the lake: travel by boat, soaring birds, and of course the ever-changing water, sky, and atmospheric phenomena of the lake.<\/p>\n

Lambourne was an artist of many talents who began his career in Salt Lake City as a designer for Salt Lake Theater. He migrated with his family from England after they converted to Mormonism, arriving in Salt Lake City in 1866. Among his friends he counted the Hudson River School artists Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, regional painter James T. Harwood, and photographer Charles Roscoe Savage. He was facile in drawing and painting, including writing early in his career as yet another artistic expression. While his oeuvre stretched beyond Great Salt Lake, it is in the lake we find Lambourne\u2019s passion.|1|<\/strong>\u00a0Walking through the splendid exhibition on view at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts,\u00a0The Savage Poem Around Me: Alfred Lambourne\u2019s Great Salt Lake<\/em>, one may wonder who Lambourne intended as the audience of his lake paintings. Today, we are fortunate to be that audience.<\/p>\n

Donna Poulton, the museum\u2019s Curator of Art of Utah and the West, has assembled an exhibition that draws us in through beautifully preserved examples of Lambourne\u2019s drawings, gouache, oil paintings, and books.|2|<\/strong>\u00a0Each work is relational, complementing neighboring pieces, imparting a true sense of Lambourne\u2019s talents. Some exhibitions can be appreciated no matter which work is viewed first. My recommendation is to follow Poulton\u2019s lead and start at the exhibition\u2019s entry room. Relying solely on Lambourne\u2019s visual art and writing, no additional didactic panels are needed to appreciate the progression from the entry\u2019s larger-than-life reproduction of Lambourne\u2019s cabin on Gunnison Island (from a private collection in Oregon) to the small, stunning painting at the end of the exhibition.<\/p>\n

The entr\u00e9e includes a few of the fourteen books Lambourne wrote, here specific to Great Salt Lake.|3|<\/strong>\u00a0His major tome\u00a0Pictures of an Inland Sea<\/em>\u00a0(1895; 1902) was published in final form as\u00a0Our Inland Sea: The Story of a Homestead<\/em>\u00a0(1909), which Poulton drew upon for exhibition wall labels. Another publication,\u00a0A Glimpse of the Great Salt Lake<\/em>\u00a0is also included in several editions, one open to a page depicting one of Lambourne\u2019s lake \u201cMirage Effects.\u201d Book pages with their black and white illustrations may not initially draw viewers interested in color, but take a closer look.\u00a0<\/a>The exhibition\u2019s tempera and gouache works were created then used as book illustrations. Displaying original grisaille (gray) paintings with their book counterparts provides us with excellent examples of Lambourne\u2019s encompassing thought process.<\/p>\n

Lambourne\u2019s books may be considered art objects, yet his writing is the art of the transcendentalist. He provided factual information on the lake from his nineteenth-century vantage point, then departed into sentences curled around the emotional language of awe and wonder. His desire\u2014 and success\u2014was his ability to draw the reader into a realm only he could see. Consider this passage from\u00a0Pictures of an Inland Sea<\/em>\u00a0(1902):<\/p>\n

There is another phenomenon to be seen at infrequent periods on the Inland Sea, one that is unpaintable, and also, I believe, entirely local. It is to be witnessed during the calm summer twilights, when the pale, fairy-like tints on the water are breathed upon by opposite currents of languid wind. As they interplay in bands, in points, in shifting isles of amber, azure and rose, the whole surface shimmers and glistens like a silken robe studded with countless pearls.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Also included in the entry room is Lambourne\u2019s small ink work, \u201cValley of Great Salt Lake\u201d (1866). It imparts modernity in its quick, clear lines, which come alive under Lambourne\u2019s mature hand. As Poulton notes, this drawing was created not when Lambourne was sixteen, a budding artist, and new to the valley, but later, to accompany his\u00a0Deseret News<\/em>\u00a0publication\u00a0The Pioneer Trail<\/em>(1913).|4|<\/strong>\u00a0Lambourne wrote of the event he had so beautifully captured in ink: \u201cNot one in our company but what felt the heart swell with joy as the sight of fields and orchards, in the latter of which hung ripened fruit, burst upon our sight.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rest of the works in the exhibition are paintings, varied in color, style, and mood. The horizontal orientation of Lambourne\u2019s canvases echo the flat expanse of the lake, occasionally broken with vertical thrusts of mountains and precipices. There is an interesting rhythm to the way Lambourne constructed cliffs and walls of rock, revealing a consistent, underlying structure in geologic formations.|5|<\/strong>\u00a0Lambourne relished familiar motifs: water, sky, cliffs, boats, and birds populate his works. An occasional person can be spotted, but they never serve as the focal point. Lambourne\u2019s paintings have as their focal point something more nebulous, found in the rhythmic winds and occasional turbulent waters of the lake. It was motion and life embodied by the lake, I believe, that drew Lambourne to paint it over and again.<\/p>\n

Black Rock formation on the south end of the lake was a region Lambourne favored. Poulton has placed three paintings of Black Rock next to each other, each showing the formation from a slightly different angle and mood. Not noted in the exhibition, but definitely noteworthy, is the recent restoration of the painting \u201cBlack Rock, Great Salt Lake\u201d (ca. 1880).|6|<\/strong>\u00a0According to UMFA\u2019s Facebook page, this work was \u201cselected by the UMFA docents as the recipient of their 2012 Docent Conservation Fund Award. This award allowed the painting to be shipped to and treated by the Western Center for the Conservation of Fine Arts (WCCFA). The need for treatment had been previously identified as part of an earlier docent conservation fund sponsored paintings survey, also completed by conservators from the WCCFA.\u201d The painting is depicted half in its original state and half digitally restored in the Facebook post; seeing the actual painting in its full restoration is a highlight of the exhibition.<\/p>\n

The evening glow of the Western sky is particularly vivid, almost garish, in \u201cSunset on Gunnison Island\u201d (1882).|7|<\/strong>\u00a0One may assume Lambourne heightened and exaggerated the lake\u2019s sunsets to the realm of the otherworldly. Today we may equate our Kodachrome sunsets to particulates and air pollution. If the sunset\u2019s colors are a contemporary phenomenon, how did Lambourne \u201csee\u201d the same colors we witness in the western sky? His paintings show us what the Native Americans who lived around Great Salt Lake knew: the lake\u2019s atmospheric inversions have always occurred in some form, due in part to a combination of the lake\u2019s evaporating waters and its high altitude.<\/p>\n

My familiarity with Lambourne\u2019s work was tested by the unexpected. There is a small canvas at the end of the exhibition, remarkable and unlike the other more polished lake paintings. Everything about \u201cUntitled\u201d (1880s) is different: the canvas is more square than horizontal; the paint application is looser and more impressionistic; the boats and people found in other paintings are absent.|8|<\/strong>\u00a0This is raw nature, a little scary and rough, with rocky precipices reminiscent of the darker views from Romantic era landscapes. Lambourne\u2019s paint application appears emotive as he depicts the emotionally charged sky bolstered by the blazing sun. The work of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) comes to mind\u2014an artist who, like Lambourne, straddled the shift from nineteenth to twentieth century, from realism to more emotional and abstract modernist tendencies.<\/p>\n

Lambourne\u2019s unabashed adoration of Great Salt Lake is refreshing. I relished slipping away in time, thoroughly immersed in paint, color, motion, and emotion. Lambourne consistently layered paint, atmospheric effects, and influences in his lake paintings, taking us back in time through works that embody a specific time yet show influences and allusions to a new world just around the corner. Great Salt Lake has been a subject of deep fascination for hundreds of years, and will continue to be so in upcoming exhibitions at Utah Museum of Fine Arts this winter and spring with contemporary art regarding Great Salt Lake. Until then, enjoy this fine view of our inland sea from the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

The Savage Poem Around Me: Alfred Lambourne\u2019s Great Salt Lake<\/em>\u00a0is at the\u00a0Utah Museum of Fine Arts<\/a>through June 15.<\/p>\n

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  The nineteenth-century Utah artist Alfred Lambourne (1850-1926) loved Great Salt Lake. Nestled within a basin, the body of water he referred to as his \u201cinland sea\u201d was his source of adventure and joy, his faithful companion and as such, his preferred place for solitude. His relationship with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1515,"featured_media":24456,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[457,784,871],"class_list":["post-24455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-alfred-lambourne","tag-donna-poulton","tag-utah-museum-of-fine-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/lambourneblog.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-01 20:08:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1515"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24455"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98075,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24455\/revisions\/98075"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}