DALLAS – The painting Road to the Hills by famed Texas artist Julian Onderdonk has been newly restored in the DMA’s Paintings Conservation Studio. Considered a masterpiece of early 20th-century Texas art, the painting will go on view Tuesday in the museum’s American art galleries on Level 4 after an absence of 60 years.
Purchased in 1919 by the Dallas Shakespeare Club and donated to the museum that same year, Road to the Hills, circa 1918, was created at the height of the artist’s career. The painting depicts the bright, reflective light of the midday sun on an isolated white road in the Texas Hill Country, which, according to DMA Chief Conservator Mark Leonard, signifies “a tour-de-force departure from the theme of the bluebonnet, and, consequently, reveals the wider range of the artist.”
Current members of the Dallas Shakespeare Club provided support for the conservation of Onderdonk’s work with a $25,000 gift.
Conservation on Road to the Hills included treatment to the canvas, original frame, and restoration from previous conservation efforts. The work, originally painted on a canvas, sustained extensive flaking problems, and in its initial restoration, most likely in the late 1950s, the original canvas was exchanged for Masonite, or fiberboard. Unfortunately, the transfer of the painting from canvas to the paneling did not prevent continued flaking; Leonard’s treatment addressed this and other age-related issues without the need to retransfer the canvas, and he undertook a complete cleaning of the painting’s surface.
During his short life, Julian Onderdonk (1882–1922) transformed the Texas landscape, creating indelible images of the Lone Star State. One of William Merritt Chase’s most dazzling students at the Shinnecock Summer School on Long Island, Onderdonk brought Chase’s aesthetic of nature to an entirely new part of the American landscape. By his death at age 40, Onderdonk had been christened “The Bluebonnet Painter,” in recognition of the success of his lush signature landscapes of fields of the state flower.
In 2008, the DMA presented Bluebonnets and Beyond: Julian Onderdonk, American Impressionist, an exhibition of more than 90 paintings that offered the first critical re-examination of one of early Texas’s most important painters.
The Paintings Conservation Studio at the Dallas Museum of Art opened in 2013 as part of the Museum’s initiative to establish a more comprehensive in-house conservation program. The Paintings Conservation Studio features state-of-the-art technology—including a digital X-ray system—and serves as a center for study and treatment of works of art as well as research into cutting-edge conservation methodologies. An adjoining gallery regularly rotates works of art, providing a space for visitors to explore the conservation process in greater detail through visual representations.