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Antiques

Shedding Light on a Landscape Painter’s Lost Years in New York

Julian Onderdonk’s “Dongan Hill, Staten Island” (1906).Credit...Julian Onderdonk, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. M.G. Glasscock

The landscape painter Julian Onderdonk spent nearly half his career in New York, but tried to cover up that unprofitable phase of his life. Onderdonk, a San Antonio native who died in 1922 at 40, moved to Manhattan while a teenager, and worked prolifically under pseudonyms to support his family. This fall, a new book and an exhibition in Houston will contrast his largely forgotten scenes of Central Park snowbanks, marshy Bronx riverfronts and Manhattan water towers with his later popular views of sun-bleached dirt roads in Texas.

Julian Onderdonk: A Catalogue Raisonné” features images of about 1,200 artworks, starting with Onderdonk’s childhood sketches of Texas streambeds and coastlines. The authors, Harry A. Halff and Elizabeth Halff, spent 20 years tracking down the works.

Onderdonk’s father, Robert, was also a painter. He struggled to make a living, though, and kept moving his family around Texas. He worried that Julian would “face a similar fate” in the harsh art world, the Halffs write in the new book. But by age 2, Julian already showed signs that he “dearly loves to paint,” his mother, Emily, wrote in her diary in 1884. By age 10, he was winning prizes at state fairs for his watercolors.

In 1901 he was sent to New York, where he took classes in Southampton, N.Y., with the painter William Merritt Chase and at the Art Students League in Manhattan. Chase, who was famously hard to please, was impressed enough with the teenage student that he painted a portrait of Onderdonk; the canvas now belongs to the Bryan Museum in Galveston, Tex. (Chase’s caustic critiques were considered so entertaining that nonstudents would crowd inside his classes to watch, according to “William Chase: A Modern Master,” the catalog for an exhibition of his work opening on Oct. 9 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

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Julian Onderdonk at work around 1915.Credit...Ernst Raba, Onderdonk Family Archives

Despite Onderdonk’s success with Chase and other prominent instructors — including Robert Henri — he found New York depressing, he told his parents after he arrived. He tried with little success to market his paintings of the Manhattan skyline, Hudson River docks, Staten Island orchards, Shelter Island coves and Catskill farms.

Living in New York made him feel like a small boat barely clinging to “the crest of a great wave of hopes,” he wrote in September 1902. He told his Texas family that while they were gathered on their peaceful front porch, they would find it hard to imagine his gritty Manhattan apartment, where he watched “chilly winds curl and twist the smoke among the chimneys, and wave it fantastically above the heads of the struggling millions.”

A little more than a year after he moved to Manhattan, he married a teenage neighbor, Gertrude Shipman. To support her and their daughter, Adrienne, he tried to make money teaching, and founded the Onderdonk School of Art on Staten Island. But it lasted only a few months. He turned out what he described as potboilers, and he reported to his family that he felt cheated by a dealer who sold them for a few dollars each. Onderdonk used pseudonyms like Charles and Chase Turner and Roberto Vasquez for the works.

In later years, he admitted that he felt some guilt about using pseudonyms. The practice, he wrote in 1916 in an unpublished memoir, “I have now come to consider as wrong.”

Those artworks inspired a book in 2014, “Julian Onderdonk in New York: The Lost Years, the Lost Paintings,” by the art historian James Graham Baker. Mr. Baker said in a recent interview that he and his wife, Kimel, were planning to update the book; more of Onderdonk’s early works with Turner signatures have surfaced since its publication.

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Julian Onderdonk’s “Blue Bonnets and Cactus in the Rain” (1914), painted in San Antonio.Credit...Julian Onderdonk, William J. Hill Collection

Onderdonk returned to Texas in 1909, and only occasionally visited New York. Collectors in his home state began to clamor for his works, which he priced at up to $750 each. (His Texas landscapes now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars each, and his New York views typically bring tens of thousands of dollars.) His gabled studio from his San Antonio property has been moved to the grounds of the Witte Museum in that city.

He became so intent on capturing Texas scenery that he ventured out on the hottest days to paint “dusty roads in the full glare of the noonday sun,” he wrote to a friend a few months before dying from an intestinal ailment. On cooler days, he wrote, “the veiling tenderness of the mists play an ever-changing symphony of color.”

After Onderdonk’s death, the family kept his studio and archive largely untouched, including his box of notecards recording which families had bought his paintings over the years. Numerous works still belong to descendants of original owners.

On Oct. 2, an exhibition, “Julian Onderdonk and the Texan Landscape,” opens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. About 35 paintings will be on view, including scenes of Staten Island pastures and Southampton dunes.

Mr. Halff said that a dozen works by Onderdonk had emerged since the catalog went to press. A few hundred are listed in the book with their “whereabouts unknown.”

And on Oct. 29, Heritage Auctions in Dallas will offer a half-dozen paintings by Onderdonk depicting Texas and the New York area.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: A Texas Landscape ArtistWho Struggled Mightily in Early-1900s New York. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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