About the work

This drawing shows the artist's art studio in Virginia City, Nevada. The title “Holding On” probably refers to the condition of the building, which was showing signs of its age in the early 1930s.

The drawing was used as a study for an oil painting Otis completed the same year with an identical composition, a photo of which is included in the Summer 1990 special edition of the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly.

About the artist…

George Demont Otis was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1879. Notes on the back of our drawing indicate that he used the Virginia City studio intermittently between 1924 and 1934. His primary residence around this time was in San Francisco where he met his future wife, whom he married in Reno in late 1931. During the summers of 1932 and 1933, Otis and his wife returned to northern Nevada to escape the cold and fog of the Bay Area. He executed the studio drawing during his summer visit in 1932. Otis completed numerous other paintings, drawings, and etchings during this period, including images of Carson Valley, Pyramid Lake, Lake Tahoe, Mogul, Carson City, and Virginia City.

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