Julian Onderdonk

During his short life, Robert Julian Onderdonk was described as “Texas’ Greatest Artist.” He is now referred to as “The Texas Old Master” and remains the most famous and best loved of Texas landscape painters. Through the exhibition of his paintings and the sale of reproductions of his works to visitors to San Antonio, Julian Onderdonk made the beauty of Texas known to Americans who had never visited the Lone Star State.

His paintings of fields in the Hill Country of central Texas, awash in sunshine, carpeted with brilliant Bluebonnets, became a legend in his native region. In fact, according to the great folklorist J. Frank Dobie (1888-1964), Onderdonk’s impressionistic and highly atmospheric depictions of wildflowers helped to make Texans themselves more appreciative of the beauty of their state flower.