Sydney Mortimer Laurence

Known for his dramatic landscape paintings of Alaska, Sydney Laurence was one of the first professionally trained artists to live in the Alaska Territory. His trademark subject was Mt. McKinley.

Laurence was in the mainstream of a large group of young artists searching for a new way to paint landscape. Reacting against the theatrical, detailed and dramatic paintings of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, and others, Laurence and his colleagues were attracted to the more subdued tonalist style and plein-air naturalism of Camille Corot and his fellow Barbizon School painters. Laurence and many of his peers were also influenced by the more ‘radical’ work of the French Impressionists, a movement that flourished from 1880 to 1915.