About the work

Titled in pencil on reverse “Desert Mallow, Desert Lavender,” followed by “La Quinta Canyon, Palm Springs, Calif.” An inventory label verso indicates that the painting was previously in the corporate art collection of the Bank of the Southwest National Association, Houston. Both painting and frame are in very good condition.

About the artist…

Carl Sammons (1883-1968) was one of the more notable early California Impressionists. His best-known subjects include California landscapes and coastal scenes. While much of his work was done in California, he also traveled and painted throughout the Western region, including sites in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.

As a true plein air artist, Sammons was attracted to the automobile as a means to reach remote locations in search of pristine, remote scenery. By the mid-1920s he used cars extensively to make painting sojourns to isolated sites around California, including the relatively small community at Palm Springs. He and his wife developed an annual travel routine that started in Santa Barbara in the late fall, then on to Palm Springs for the winter, and back north to Carmel and the Sierras before ending up in Humboldt County.

His favorite locations around Palm Springs included Andreas Canyon, the Anza Borrego Desert, San Gorgonio, San Jacinto, the Palm Springs Desert, and—as shown in his painting “Desert Mallow, Desert Lavender”—the scenery at La Quinta Canyon. Sammons exhibited paintings in 1942 at the Desert Inn Gallery in Palm Springs, and he may have been associated with the Desert Art Center in the early 1950s.

His friends included a number of now famous California artists, like Edward Borein, Paul Grimm, Lorenzo Latimer, DeWitt Parshall, Thaddeus Welch, and Will Frates, some of whom he occasionally painted with. Sammons didn't participate in many public exhibits, but when he did it was alongside the likes of Carl Oscar Borg, Maynard Dixon, John Hilton, Jean Mannheim, Edgar Payne, Jack Wilkinson Smith, and Jimmy Swinnerton.

After a career that spanned more than fifty years, Carl Sammons died in Oakland in 1968.  

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