Millie Russ Sierra Forest Oil on Canvas, South Lake Tahoe, Framed, c. 1970–1990

The Painting

A Sierra forest interior by Millie Russ of South Lake Tahoe, an oil on canvas of tall conifer trunks rising into a pale turquoise haze, signed Millie at the lower right and inscribed on the stretcher bar with her full name and the town. Two great trunks stand in the foreground, one at the left edge and one at the center, their bark worked in a crackled texture that reads as the deep furrows of old-growth cedar and pine, with a swag of green moss hanging from a bough at the upper left. Behind them the forest recedes in ranks of paler trunks that fade one into the next, the light coming through the mist in soft vertical bands, and the undergrowth fills the bottom of the picture with dark green brush, grasses, a tree of plum-colored leaves and a scatter of pink and red wildflowers along a dirt path that leads into the trees.

The technique is the interesting part. The painter built the bark of the two main trunks in a crackle medium over a warm ochre ground, so that the surface splits into the fine, irregular network that real bark has, and then glazed the furrows dark; the rest of the picture is painted thin and smooth in the fog and sky and thicker in the foliage and flowers, where the brush is loaded and the blossoms are laid on in single strokes. The palette is cool and quiet, aqua and gray-green against the amber of the trunks, and the picture has the stillness of a forest in the morning before the sun has burned through.

The canvas is a 20 by 30 inch commercial stretcher by Wolsey Industries, stapled at the back, and the back of the canvas is clean and unlined with the painter's name and S. Lake Tahoe in ink on the top bar. The paint surface is stable, the crackle on the trunks is intentional and secure, and there are no losses, tears or repairs. The painting is presented in a wide gilt frame with a carved acanthus outer band, a beaded inner edge and a pale linen liner, which suits the warm tones of the trunks and gives the picture a finished, traditional presence.

History & Provenance

Lake Tahoe has had its own painters since the resort days of the nineteenth century, and in the decades after the 1960 Olympics brought the South Shore its casinos and its year-round population, a community of working artists grew up around the galleries, the art league and the summer shows at the lake. Most of them painted what was outside the door: the big trees, the granite, the water and the light that comes through the forest on the west slope of the Sierra. Millie Russ was one of these painters. She signed her canvases with her first name and marked the stretchers with her full name and her town, which is how working artists kept track of their pictures at the local shows, and this forest interior, with its crackle-textured trunks, is a confident studio piece rather than a sketch.

No exhibition record has been found for the painter beyond the inscription itself, and the painting is offered as the work of a South Lake Tahoe artist of the later twentieth century. The dating rests on the materials and the construction rather than style alone: the stamped Wolsey Industries stretcher bars, the stapled canvas, the crackle medium and the acrylic-bright turquoise ground are all consistent with a picture painted between about 1970 and 1990.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A forest interior is the most restful kind of landscape to live with. There is no horizon to compete with the room, only a screen of tall trunks and soft light, and the cool turquoise and gray-green sit easily with white walls, natural wood and linen, while the amber bark and the gilt frame carry warmth into a darker room. It belongs over a sofa, a bed or a sideboard, in a mountain house or a cabin, in a study or a hallway, and it reads from across the space as a window into the woods. For a shop or designer client it is the framed, signed, locally painted Sierra landscape in a generous size that Tahoe and mountain-house buyers look for.