Art Brokerage: Sydney Mortimer Laurence (1865??"1940) was a Romantic landscape painter and is widely considered one of Alaska's most important historical artists. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and studied at the Art Students League of New York. He married Alexandrina Fredricka Dupre in 1889, and they traveled to England. Laurence came to Alaska in 1903 or 1904. As one of Alaska's most widely beloved historical painters, Sydney Laurence was the first professionally trained artist to make Alaska his home. Previously, settling in 1889 in the English artist 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. Living the hard life of the pioneer prospector in Alaska, 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 Alaska Natives, miners, and trappers engaged in their often solitary lives in the northern wilderness. But the image of Denali 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." He died in Anchorage in 1940.
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