Kansas State University

Please join us as we post information about pieces in the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art’s permanent collection from …to build up a rich collection… Selected works from The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art.

All pieces in this series are on display now at the museum.  We hope you will join in the discussion and enjoy learning in-depth about the heart of the museum, our permanent collection.

So, what do these pieces make you wonder?

The acquisition of these two paintings represents the beginning of K-State’s programmatic and mission-driven collecting activity. Still Water and Fall in the Mountains are representative of Sandzén’s mature painting style, a style characterized by a preference for landscape as subject, bold and vigorous brushwork, heavily impastoed surfaces, and a high-keyed palette. The Swedish-born Sandzén came to Kansas from his native country in 1894, taking a teaching position at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. His bravura brushstroke and neoimpressionist palette were products of his study with fellow Swede Anders Zorn (1862-1920) in Stockholm and with Edmond-Franҫois Aman-Jean (1860-1935) in Paris. Sandzén’s attraction to the wide-open spaces of the American landscape was rooted in his youthful fascination with the mythic American West, a fascination shared by many young Swedish men of his generation.

As an incretion on the verso of the painting indicates, the locale depicted in Still Water is Graham Country, Kansas, located in the extreme northwest corner of the state. Graham County was among Sandzén’s favorite sketching grounds. In 1906 Eric and Charlotte Leksell, the parents of Sandzén’s wife Frida, moved to Hill City in Graham County, where they lived on a 480 acre farm. Throughout his career, Sandzén made many sojourns to Graham County, which provided the artist with a fertile source of inspiration. Among Sandzén’s favorite Graham Country subjects was Wild Horse Creek, likely the site depicted in Still Water.

Fall in the Mountains depicts a scene in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, another of Sandzén’s favorite sources of subjects. In 1908 Sandzén made what was probably his first serious Colorado sketching trip. By 1913 he was a regular visitor of the state. In 1926, the year before he painted Fall in the Mountains, Sandzén began spending his summers in Estes Park in Rocky Mountain National Park, a practice he would continue, nearly uninterrupted, for the next fifteen years. In 1925 Carl Smalley, a McPherson, Kansas art dealer and promoter of Sandzén’s work, published In the Mountains, which featured an introduction by the Emporia, Kansas, journalist William

Allen White and reproductions of Sandzén’s lithographs of Colorado subjects. White was a frequent companion of Sandzén’s in Estes Park. The composition of Fall in the Mountains is one often favored by Sandzén: a body of water in the foreground and middle ground, running diagonally across the lower register of the image with a group of three or four trees along the opposite bank in the foreground, all set against some sort of geologic formation. It was a composition Sandzén employed in his 1930 lithograph, A Kansas Creek, a depiction of Wild Horse Creek. This print was the first gift print offered by the Prairie Print Makers, the Kansas-based print society founded in Sandzén’s Lindsborg studio in December 1930. Sandzén would utilize a similar composition in his lithograph, Lake in the Rockies, the 1948 gift print issued by Friends of Art at K-State. Given K-State’s earlier acquisition of Fall in the Mountains and the similarities between it and Lake in the Rockies, it seems almost certain that the print depicts the same Colorado site as the painting.

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