Title: Texas art and a wildcatter's dream
First published: 1998
Description: At a crucial moment in the development of Texas art, an eccentric oil wildcatter form Massachusetts and Luling, Texas, turned to the prestigious San Antonio Art League with a proposal. He would fund a national art competition featuring the state's verdant fields of wildflowers and bring prominence to Texas art if the league would handle the details.

Thus was born the Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, which in three years at the end of the Roaring Twenties awarded more than $53,000 in prize money for paintings of Texas wildflowers, ranch life, and cotton farming.

This presentation of twenty-nine color plates of the competitions' best works includes paintings by such important artists as Jose Arpa, Dawson Dawson-Watson, Xavier Gonzalez, Edward G. Eisenlohr, and Oscar E. Berninghaus and Herbert Dunton (the latter duo having also served as founding members of the Taos Society of Artists). In the plates, the artists have portrayed a variety of landscapes and atmospheres to present the wildflowers loved not only by Davis but by generations of Texas art enthusiasts.
Subjects: American Painting, Art patronage, Competitions, Painting, Painting, American, Regionalism in art, Wild flowers in art, Flowers in art, Painting, modern, 20th century, Art, american, Modern Painting
Places: Texas
People: Edgar B. Davis (b. 1873)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: ND1402.6 .R43 1998