Repose by Sam Hyde Harris, Oil on Board P3551

A tranquil desert scene with layered blue-gray mountains rising behind a sandy wash, a lone green tree anchoring the foreground alongside scattered desert scrub. Harris's soft, hazy handling of the distant peaks gives the piece a real sense of quiet and depth. Signed lower right, and stamped on the reverse from the artist's official estate — solid provenance for a major figure in early California plein air painting.

Born in England in 1889, Harris emigrated with his family to Los Angeles in 1903 and began working as a commercial sign painter as a teenager, eventually running his own successful studio while pursuing fine art on the side. He studied under Hanson Puthuff starting in 1906, and by 1920 was exhibiting with the California Art Club, going on to a decades-long career showing throughout Southern and Northern California. He and Puthuff took frequent painting trips together into the backcountry of Arizona and California in search of atmospheric desert and mountain light — exactly the kind of scene captured here. He settled in Alhambra in the 1940s, working from a studio on the San Gabriel Valley's old "Artists' Alley," and remained active as a painter well into his later years. Presented in a brushed silver frame.

Art measures 18" x 24", in frame 23.5" x 29.5"