Gallery
19TH & 20TH CENTURY
Julian E. Itter ( American, late 19th, early 20th C. )
Sawtooth Mountain Region Landscape
Oil on Canvas
22 1/2" x 32 1/2", Signed (l.l.) "Itter"
Antique Frame
SOLD
Julian E. Itter was born in Canada and moved to America at the turn of the 20th century. Itter adopted the West Coast U.S. landscape as his own. He made his name as a painter of the Cascade Range and the Lake Chelan region in Washington State. He was an important early advocate for preserving the natural beauty of the Washington landscape and is widely considered the founding father of the North Cascades National Park.
In 1906, the Butler Hotel in Seattle hosted an exhibition of his paintings. An accompanying article published in the Seattle Times hailed his “studies on the pine trees in the woods of Washington are other of his best pictures”.
Shortly thereafter, Itter traveled to France to exhibit his work. At that time, leading Parisian art critic, Victor Forbin, called Itter “the most promising American artist” he had known for twenty-five years.
Upon his return to the Northwest in 1912, he employed his more refined and studied techniques for depicting views of the Stehelein Valley, in addition to other locales. Living in Spokane at this time, a New York art broker arrived to get the rights to the paintings of the artist. He told reporters that he had “crossed the continent” to make sure that he acquired “what we believe to be the American artist” (presumably emphasizing the word “the”). These comments were documented in an April 1912 article about Itter, in The Spokesman Review.
Itter’s paintings have been held in numerous private and corporate collections including the Ronald K. Shepherd Collection, and Weyerhauser Family Collections.