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Langdon Smith 1870 - 1959

Sierra Buttes Oil on canvas, 30 x 35 $4,500

Langdon Smith was a boy in the early 1870’s when his family moved from Massachusetts to Pasadena. He studied art at the Los Angeles School of Design, and at age 25 moved east and found work as an illustrator with the New York Herald.

Feeling the call of the call of the outdoors, he rejected big city life and returned to California. Between 1805 and 1806, while keeping up his interests in art, he was a working partner in a stage coach line between Mojave and Olancha, California. Between 1907 and 1912, his illustrations were to be found on 22 covers of West Coast Magazine and in books.

Begining in1915, he would winter in his Los Angeles studio, and spend the non-snowy months in Forest City, California, a small gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California. There he prospected and painted. In 1959, at the age of 89, he died in Grass Valley, California.

Smith is noted for recording the last of the Old West, in ink, watercolor, and oil. His cowboy drawings compare well with those of Ed Borein.

Source: Artists in California 1786 - 1940, Edan Milton Hughes, 3d ed.