The artists who roamed California’s beaches and mountains and canyons  in the early decades of the 20th century are all gone now. So are many of the landscapes they painted.

But their visions – Orange County’s sandy plains, river basins and rugged hillsides among them – live on in works of stunning light and color that go on display at the Irvine Museum Oct. 6 in an exhibition that will last about four months.

After that, this mobile museum takes its show on the road, traveling to a variety of museums around California.

“The real joy of the paintings is they show our own immediate area before it was developed, when it was just virginal land,” said Jean Stern, the museum’s executive director.

The show and an accompanying book, “Selections from the Irvine Museum,” is an updated and expanded version of what can be found in a book by the same name issued in 1992. The museum opened in 1993.

The museum is made up of some 1,200 paintings, plus about 2,000 the museum can borrow from a collection owned by Joan Irvine Smith and another 150 owned by James Irvine Swinden, her oldest son. The new exhibit will include about 65 to 70 paintings.

“The museum has grown in quality as well as quantity,” Stern said. “It’s kind of like saying, ‘Here we are, 17 years later, and see how far we’ve come.””

And while the museum remains in a “temporary space” in Irvine, Stern said the lack of a permanent building is intentional.

“We put together a museum that was really defined as the paintings themselves, and not a building,” he said. “Mrs. Smith had the idea: let’s redefine our museum as the collection.”

The artists, including names well known in art circles such as Guy Rose, William Wendt and Franz Bischoff, devoted themselves to capturing natural surroundings using a method called plein air.

“Plein air is just a French term meaning ‘outdoors,” Stern said. “What it really is is California impressionism. In California there was a continuation of the American impressionist movement, which began back east in about 1890. It didn’t really reach California until 1895 or 1900.”

Most of the paintings in the show were done between 1900 and 1930, he said.

The slideshow shown here is a selection of paintings of Orange County subjects, including rivers, seascapes and eucalyptus groves.

The museum is at 18881 Von Karman Ave., open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. except on Sundays and Mondays.

Latest posts:

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.