Louis Aston Knight was born in Paris, son of highly successful American expatriate painter Daniel Ridgeway Knight.  An outdoorsman at heart, Aston Knight fled the urban ateliers of Paris, moving to Normandy with his wife around 1907.  It was at this time that Knight began painting thatched cottages beside the flowering streams of his home.  He went to such lengths to capture the effects of natural light on water that a 1907 Scribner’s Magazine article nicknamed him “The Man in the High-Water Boots” for his practice of painting in the shallows on the stream itself. The following decade Knight moved to an old Normandy mill once owned by the poet Chateaubriand and, inspired by the gardens of Monet, create a pastoral garden legacy that he would name Diana’s Cottage. 

In 1923, Knight moved to California and painted views of San Francisco, Santa Monica and the Monterey Peninsula. California Flowers, Holmby Hills is an exceptional example of his California views and is a rare work as it is painted in Holmby Hills, between Beverly Hills and Bel-Air. Reminiscent of Knight’s landscape views from Paris, Normandy and Rouen, California Flowers is unique in this phase of Knight’s production because of its flowering vista, probably dating it to shortly after his arrival. A profusion of colorful blooms fills the foreground of the composition, differing from his French garden views only with its American flora. Beyond this wild garden, a green valley recedes into the distance, dotted with lush groves and California mission-style houses.  The golden light and brilliant color of Knight’s French period is carried over into the work, as is his firm drawing, consistent with his principle that “the drawing is what counts.”   This commitment to drawing is balanced with a lively, almost impressionistic brushwork that adds to the cheerful sensation of an abundant and vigorous nature.

 

Born in Sweden, of humble means Carl Oscar Borg begin working as a house painter learning to mix paints and create decorative wall motives. His expertise led to various jobs throughout Europe and eventually to a position where he tinted photographs and began to paint seascapes. In 1901 he exchanged his paintings for free passage to the United States. Eventually settling in Los Angeles he continued to paint and show his work. There he developed friendships with many artists. William Wendt (1865-1946) became a close friend who influenced him more than any other painter. Borg developed his own unique style and his work was exhibited with the Southern California Impressionists.  Carl Oscar Borg was likeable, virile, and resourceful man filled with wanderlust. His patronesses Phoebe Apperson Hearst and Mary Gibson furthered his exciting career that was filled with extended travel and study throughout Europe and Central America.

Borg began his annual trips to Arizona and New Mexico to paint the Indians in 1916. Originally, the Bureau of American Ethnology and the University of California, Berkeley hired him to photograph and paint the Navajo and Hopi before their native customs and culture had disappeared.  Los Angeles art critic, Arthur Millier, said of Borg in a 1948 memorial exhibition of his work "Much of his choicest work…consists of watercolors and gouaches in which his forceful drawing and fresh notation of color are seen at their height." This gouache is truly one of the choice paintings that Arthur Millier was describing.

In the Navajo Country is vivid in color and represents Borg at his best.  This marvelous work came directly from a family who purchased the painting from the artist. It was exhibited in the 1940s at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.