Top of the Ridge

Although Maynard Dixon was based in San Francisco for forty years, the Southwest captured his artistic imagination. Together with his wife, famed Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange, he made numerous trips to Arizona and New Mexico, spending months living on a Hopi reservation. Dixon’s paintings of the West invoke a more modern sensibility than other depictions of the West in this gallery. “The melodramatic Wild West is not for me,” he once stated. “The more lasting qualities are in the quiet and more broadly human aspects of western life.” He was drawn to what he described as “the poetry and pathos of life of western people seen amidst the grandeur, sternness, and loneliness of their country.”