Birger Sandzén (1871-1954) Riverbank with Cedars, Rocheport, MO signed and dated 'Birger Sandzén / 1928' (lower right), titled, dated and signed again, and inscribed 'Lindsborg, KS.' (on the stretcher) oil on canvas 35 7/8 x 48in framed 39 x 52in Painted in 1928. Footnotes: Provenance The artist. Private collection, New Jersey, acquired directly from the above, by family descent. Birger Sandzén was a Swedish-born artist famous for his distinct and vibrant landscape paintings of the American southwest and his homeland. The son of a minister, Sandzén displayed an early artistic talent, which was encouraged and cultivated by his parents. His formal artistic training was completed in Europe, and in 1894 he immigrated to America, where he accepted a teaching position at Bethany College. For more than 52 years, Sandzén was a professor of art history, drawing, and painting in the small Kansas town of Lindsborg. He was a staunch advocate of the arts and worked within his community to organize art clubs, exhibitions, and lectures. Surprisingly, Sandzén's own painting was relegated to late night sessions until 1945, when he retired from teaching in order to devote himself to painting full time. Sandzén's early artistic style was heavily influenced by Tonalism and Scandinavian Romanticism, but once he began spending his summers in the American southwest, his palette exploded with color. In 1922, Sandzén was elected an associate member of the Taos Society of Artists and exhibited with the group in New York, where he also had a one-man exhibition at the Babcock Gallery. Emory Linguist wrote about Sandzén's work: 'The kind of simplification that one finds in these canvases is what the modernists have apparently sought but have, to the present time, secured only clumsily. It is the simplification of nature with a broad vision. It is founded on tradition and it has the basic qualities common with all great art...It is modern. It is contemporary. It is essentially American. It breathes the spirit of the West and it opens new vision. Here is a painter who is worth remembering and whose experimentation must be regarded with utmost respect.' 1 Sandzén was truly a maverick of his time. His unique response to Impressionism embodied the spirit of the Post-Impressionists in bold bursts of thick, textural impasto and colorful brushwork such as in Riverbank with Cedars, Rocheport, Missouri. Composed on a high bluff above the Missouri River, the painting's dominant foreground cypress grouping extends skyward above a rocky coast painted in purple tones that contrast with and make the trees' rich green and yellow foliage pop. Unconcerned with naturalistic depictions of light and color, the artist's style instead creates expressive emotion and dynamic movement in a singular aesthetic unique to Western landscape painting. 1 E. Lindquist, Birger Sandzén: An Illustrated Biography, Lawrence, Kansas, 1993, p. 81.