Rising Road with Mount Tamalpais

With William Keith, Francis McComas, Lorenzo Latimer, and Sydney Yard, Percy Gray was among the best known of California's Tonalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gray was especially adept in watercolor. He began his career as a newspaper illustrator in San Francisco, then spent eleven years working in New York for William Randolph Hearst's Journal. While in the East, Gray studied with William Merritt Chase and William Appleton Clark at the art Students League before the Great Earthquake of 1906 drew him back to his native state, where he lived the remainder of his life. Immediately on his return to San Francisco, Gray began painting and exhibiting watercolors in an aesthetic environment that had grown even more receptive to landscape painting. His earlier works, Rising Road with Mount Tamalpais among them, evoke some of Chase's Shinnecock landscapes, as well as the watercolors of Barbizon-style artists such as Dwight Tryon and Henry Farrer, who could elicit a latent grandeur from the prosaically pastoral. Here voluminous clouds answer the treetops and both preside over the dialogue of the curving path and the dormant crest of Mount Tamalpais, in Marin County, which dominates the Bay Area landscape.