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Ad Code: 3
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from Auction House Records.
Resting on the Trail, 1952
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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Biography from AskART:
| Born in Vastervik, Sweden, Oscar Jacobson painted several hundred landscapes of the Southwest and West in states including Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. Although he devoted much of his time and energy to the teaching of art, during the summers, he was in virtually all of the West excepting Death Valley and southern Oklahoma, and during sabbaticals, he painted in Morocco and France. Much of his painting was from his Rocky Mountain studio near Allenspark, Colorado.
Jacobson was brought to the United States in 1890 at age eight, and at age 13 ran away from his family farm in Kansas to work on ranches farther west. His idea apparently was to earn money to pay for his education, and by 1916, he had accomplished that goal. In 1908, he graduated from Bethany College in Linsborg, Kansas, where he was the pupil of Birger Sandzen. From 1911 to 1915, he taught in the state of Washington, where he met and married Jeanne D'Ucel, an exchange teacher from France. Later they wrote articles together about American Indian and Oklahoma non-Indian artists.
He also studied at the Louvre in Paris and earned a degree from Yale University in 1916. After that, until 1945, he taught at the University of Oklahoma, was Director of the School of Art, and was sponsor, benefactor, and guide to fame of the Indian painters' guild, "Five Kiowas." These Native American artists, whose work Jacobson admired, were brought to the University by him and given studio space. The expanded group of 31 artists earned international attention when their work was exhibited at the Prague Expo of 1928.
Of Jacobson's service to the University of Oklahoma, art historian Doris Dawdy wrote: "He used his considerable knowledge of art history, and his lectures and teaching, to imbue his students with courage to break with the provincialism in art that dominated much of the country during the first thirty years of this century."
He lectured widely for the Park Service and was a technical advisor for the Public Works Administration.
Written by Lonnie Pierson Dunbier
Sources:
Peggy and Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West
Doris Dawdy, Artists of the American West, Volume III
Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art
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