Maynard Dixon (American, 1875-1946) Roundup, 1927 Oil on canvas laid on board 16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm) Signed and dated lower left: Maynard Dixon / 1927 Signed, titled, and inscribed on the reverse: Roundup / Maynard Dixon / 728 Montgomery St / San Francisco PROVENANCE: Private collection, California. Born in Fresno, California, in 1875, Maynard Dixon was largely self-taught, although he briefly attended San Francisco's Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in 1893. He began publishing illustrations that same year and spent decades traveling and living throughout the American West. These experiences provided an enduring foundation for his depictions of ranching communities, Native American subjects, and desert landscapes. Sustained observation of the region's people and places lent specificity to his imagery, even as his compositions became increasingly defined by simplified forms and carefully balanced color relationships. The 1920s marked a significant period in Dixon's artistic development. His marriage to photographer Dorothea Lange in 1920 coincided with a deepening commitment to painting and growing independence from the narrative conventions of commercial illustration. Broad landforms, strong silhouettes, and expansive passages of earth and sky allowed him to reconcile descriptive observation with the formal discipline of American modernism. His work as a mural painter further encouraged an approach to composition in which clearly articulated masses and spatial relationships could give even a small painting a sense of monumentality. Painted in 1927, Roundup brings a familiar subject of Western life into a distinctly modernist pictorial framework. From an elevated viewpoint, Dixon surveys cattle and mounted riders distributed across an open plain. A dense, irregular band of animals fills the foreground, giving way to smaller groupings in the middle distance. Mounted riders punctuate the herds, directing their movement and establishing rhythmic intervals across the terrain. No individual assumes the conventional role of heroic protagonist. Instead, the arrangement emphasizes the coordinated labor of the roundup and the scale of the landscape within which it unfolds. The painting balances descriptive detail with abstraction. Rust, chestnut, and dark-brown forms animate the foreground, while cooler greens and muted ochres recede toward pale mountains beneath an open sky. The contrast between the densely gathered herd and the expansive landscape creates depth and reinforces the composition's rhythmic structure. Horses, cattle, and riders remain distinct, yet abbreviated brushwork integrates them into broader patterns of color, shape, and movement. Through carefully calibrated proportions and spatial relationships, Dixon achieves a sense of monumentality, giving land and sky equal weight to the activity of the roundup. In Roundup, 1927, Dixon unites the collective labor of ranching with the expansive Western landscape, transforming a familiar regional subject into a distinctly modern composition of rhythmic forms and sweeping space HID12401132022 © 2026 Heritage Auctions | All Rights Reserved www.HA.com/TexasAuctioneerLicenseNotice

Private collection, California.

A few small surface accretions along edges. Minor wear and small losses along extreme edges. Under UV examination, varnish fluoresces unevenly; small diagonal line of inpaint above horizon just right of center. Areas of skinning, remnants of old adhesive, marked foxing visible to verso of board.
Framed Dimensions 19 X 23 Inches