Frank Tenney Johnson (1874-1939)
Rim Rock Wrangler
signed and dated 'F. Tenney Johnson / NA / 1935' (lower left)
oil on canvas
28 x 36 in.
framed 34 x 42 in.
Footnotes:
Provenance
The artist.
Biltmore Art Salon, Los Angeles, California.
Mr. Walker, Warren, Pennsylvania, from the above.
Jack Barim, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, California, from the above.
Altermann & Morris Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 2, 1996, lot 21.
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

Exhibited
Los Angeles, Biltmore Salon, Exhibition of Paintings by F. Tenney Johnson, A.N.A., A Painter of the West, November 4-30, 1935, no. 8.

Literature
Alma May Cook, Los Angeles Herald Express, 'F. Tenny [sic] Johnson's Art on Display. Boyhood Ambition Realized. Decided at Age 5 to Be a Painter.', November 6, 1935.
Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, archival photo 72.115.

We wish to thank Melissa Webster Speidel for her kind assistance in cataloging the lot. This artwork is included in the catalogue raisonné database Melissa Webster Speidel is compiling of the artist's oil paintings.

Frank Tenney Johnson is celebrated for his solitary depictions of cowboys and their horses set against the dramatic and vast open ranges of the Western United States. Rim Rock Wrangler is a masterwork of this genre, painted in Wyoming at the height of Johnson's career. According to the archival photograph caption in the collection of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the subject of the present work is Don Huntington and his horse Tejon.

While maintaining a primary home and studio in Alhambra near Los Angeles, Johnson built a second summer log home on the famous Rim Rock Ranch, owned by his cousin Mildred and her husband Earl Martin in the early 1930s. 1 Johnson spent the summers between 1931 and his untimely death in 1939 painting and hiking around this Wyoming cabin located near Cody and the East entrance to Yellowstone National Park, on the North fork of the Shoshone River.

Rim Rock Wrangler depicts a moment of stillness as Huntington stands in front of his saddled horse Tejon looking over his left shoulder toward a vast canyon landscape and distant gathering storm clouds. The figure's crisp white shirt and the buckskin horse's white tail pick-up the sun glare, while Johnson paints in detail the leather work on figure's dramatically flared chaps, his boots and the saddle.

Johnson was born and raised in Iowa on a humble prairie farm a stone's throw from the historic Overland Trail. Watching the stagecoaches pass by sparked his imagination and fueled his fascination with the West. His interest in art took hold at the age of fourteen, when his family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In a big city for the first time, he was inspired by visits to the Layton Art Gallery, Milwaukee's first public art museum, and resolved to become an artist. As a self-motivated and enterprising young man, he dropped out of school to apprentice under two German expatriate artists who shaped his work in different ways. From Frederick William Heine, he gained a strong technical background and exposure to commercial art-making, and from Richard Lorenz, he found a champion of Western subjects and a kindred spirit.

By 1895, at the age of twenty-one, the allure of New York City proved irresistible. Johnson traveled to New York for the first time and trained at the Art Students League under John Henry Twachtman. Though it was a short five-month stint, it was an auspicious start to his artistic career in New York. Johnson pursued additional training under National Academicians Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase and worked as a commercial illustrator. In 1903, through a fortuitous commission for the Winchester rifle company, he landed a major commission with Field & Stream magazine that enabled him to travel extensively through the West. 2 On this seminal trip, Johnson visited cattle ranches in Colorado and Indian pueblos in the Southwest, completely 'embedding' in the local culture and understanding the values and habits of his subjects first-hand. In this setting, he found the heroic cowboy archetype that would inspire his work for nearly four decades.

Johnson returned to Manhattan in 1904 to complete his Field & Stream commission. Commercial success ensued with magazine commissions from Cosmopolitan, Harper's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, and Metropolitan Magazine among others. Book cover commissions by Western pulp novelists such as Zane Grey added to his growing popularity.

In 1912 and 1918, Johnson felt the pull of the West again, traveling further out to the Plains states, the West coast, and Southwest. 2 The financial security that commercial illustration afforded and an increase in dealer representation spurred Johnson toward easel painting. Johnson settled in the small artist enclave of Alhambra, California near Los Angeles in the 1920s and shared a studio with Clyde Forsythe. He was represented by important Los Angeles dealer Earl Stendahl of Stendahl Galleries, and his prominence as an artist was on the rise. In addition to his own paintings and commercial work, Johnson also received mural commissions, including a series that decorated the Cathy Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. A decade later, career success enabled Johnson to summer in the pristine environment of his Wyoming cabin.

Johnson was a master of myth-making, both in his life and art. While he is considered by many as following in the footsteps of Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell, his primary biographer Harold McCracken believed that he surpassed them by adding 'a strong aesthetic beauty' to his paintings. 3 Johnson's introspection and sensitivity to the difficult and isolated life of the Western cowboy is on spectacular display in Rim Rock Wrangler.

1 Harold McCracken, The Frank Tenney Johnson Book: A Master Painter of The Old West, New York, 1974, p. 123.
2 McCracken, pp. 107, 114.
3 Ibid, p. 11.