Visual Arts

During the summer of 1901, the same year the bluebonnet edged out the cactus flower and the cotton boll to be crowned the state flower of Texas, 19-year-old Julian Onderdonk wrote a letter to his parents from Southampton, Long Island, where he was studying painting under the illustrious William Merritt Chase.

Alexander H. Albritton

Julian Onderdonk's In the Hills of the Spanish Oaks

"I long to get out in the open air with my palette in one hand and my brush in the other and be able to smear paint over the whole landscape," the San Antonio native confided.

But a decade passed before Mr. Onderdonk found his most important inspiration – the lush fields of bluebonnets that envelop the Hill Country each spring, scenery that he ultimately transformed into a series of iconic images of South Texas.

Before his untimely death at age 40, Mr. Onderdonk became established as a renowned Texas landscape painter. And in "Bluebonnets and Beyond: Julian Onderdonk," the Dallas Museum of Art has mounted an exhibition that argues for a reappraisal of the artist as more complex than previously understood.

Though the exhibition contains more than 90 works, Mr. Onderdonk's admirers will be most familiar with 24 of his bluebonnet paintings, which are hung together in a single room. Seen this way, these works, including Untitled (Fields of Bluebonnets), create the impression that the viewer has just wandered into a field exploding with flowers, some merging with a misty purple sky, others cascading down hillsides.

Dallas Museum of Art

Untitled (Field of Bluebonnets) and 23 other bluebonnet paintings by Julian Onderdonk are hung in a single room of the exhibit.

The paintings' prettiness raises a fundamental question: Was Mr. Onderdonk (1882-1922) producing merely decorative works to appeal to buyers, or was his intention more serious?

The answer is probably a bit of both. Mr. Onderdonk admitted that he continued to paint bluebonnets because they "sold easily."

But the exhibition's thoughtful arrangement aims to reveal the principles that informed his work, especially how much he absorbed from Chase, the American Impressionist and art teacher whose students also included Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth and Onderdonk's father, Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, among many others. (An exhibition of some three dozen works by Robert Jenkins Onderdonk is running concurrently at the DMA.)

"The way Onderdonk learned to look at landscapes is the way Chase taught him to look at landscapes," says William Keyse Rudolph, the exhibition's curator. "Chase's influence on Julian has enormous implications, especially when we look at what he finally did with the bluebonnets."

Chase instructed Mr. Onderdonk at both the Art Students League in Manhattan and Chase's Shinnecock Summer School of Art on Long Island's South Fork. The exhibition, which includes four of Chase's paintings, makes clear that Mr. Onderdonk appropriated the range of Chase's compositional components, his broken brushwork, sometimes even his figures, and most importantly, his ideas.

Frank and Mary Hart

Glimpse of the Sea, Long Island explores landscapes in an ever-changing natural world.

In paintings such as Glimpse of the Sea, Long Island, Mr. Onderdonk was exploring the implications of Chase's view that landscape painting was a way to apprehend an ever-changing natural world. The painting is part of several series of works in which Mr. Onderdonk returned repeatedly to paint the same subject – in this case Shelter Island floating on the Long Island Sound in the distance – as a way of getting beyond the ephemeral qualities of the here and now and rendering nature in something like its purest form.

Mr. Onderdonk discovered bluebonnets as a subject in 1911, two years after he left New York for permanent residence in San Antonio. (In 1906 he took over from his father the job of organizing the art exhibition at the Texas State Fair, a position he held until his death.)

In his first bluebonnet painting, Spring Morning, the flowers emerge tentatively among the cactus and brush. Ultimately, Mr. Onderdonk returned to the Texas flower more than any other subject.

The exhibition is also scheduled to travel to the Witte Museum in San Antonio and the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas.

Kevin Richardson is a Dallas freelance writer.

Plan your life

"Bluebonnets and Beyond: Julian Onderdonk, American Impressionist" and companion exhibition "Discovering Texas: The Works of Robert Jenkins Onderdonk" open today and continue through July 20 at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood at Ross. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays through Sundays and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays. $10, free 5 to 9 p.m. each Thursday and first Tuesday of every month. 214-922-1200. www.dallasmuseumofart.org.