Fernand Lungren

Fernand Harvey Lungren  (1857 - 1932)

Fernand Lungren was born in Hagerstown, Maryland in 1857 and was raised in Toledo, Ohio. Lungren is an artist best known for his grand paintings of the Southwest and California. His depictions of Native Americans and America’s vast deserts gained him international acclaim. 

As a young  man, he attended the University of Maryland but he skipped around art schools, also studying art in Cincinnati In the 1880s Fernand Lungren traveled to Paris where he attended some classes at the Académie Julian before giving up formal training and instead, began watching Paris and its people including fashionably women, flanuer's  sits alone and modern Paris’s shifing social environment where café culture began offering women new opportunities for leisure in public spaces. Although Lungren is known for his dense, hard-edged style, images, of modern life, and experiments with light.

Eventually Lungren attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he met Thomas Eakins.

Lungren began his art career as an illustrator, working for Harper’s, Scribner's Monthly, and other New York magazines. In 1892, Lungren’s life changed, when he was hired by the Santa Fe Railroad. This enabled him to see New Mexico, where he spent time near Santa Fe area sketching pueblos and desert buttes. In 1893, he traveled to Arizona where he got to know the Hopi Indian tribe. Lungren became entranced by the desert, and it was in the North American Desert where he found his greatest muse.

Lungren’s work often depicts the abundant beauty that exists in the the desert. Many people think of the desert as a vast, hot, and inhospitable area. For artists like Fernand Lungren the desert inspired an unusual artistic enlightenment where he found inspiration and happiness in this arid and bewildering place.

He painted scenes from the four great North American deserts including the Great Basin, Sonoran, Mojave, and Chihuahuan. Much like the Hudson River School on the East Coast painters of the desert discovered spirituality in the land. Like the Romantic painters, artist like Lungren explored the humbling power of nature over man.  

With a bold use of color and loose, sweeping brushstrokes, Lungren’s paintings capture the shapes and earthen tones of a parched land, thunderous sky, and rolling hills. In paintings of the Grand Canyon, Lungren juxtaposes the irony of the desert – a river swallowed by an arid, rocky cliffs.

Lungren moved to Santa Barbara, California in 1903 where he spent the remainder of his life. His small but resonant paintings capture the expansive, alluring, and often mysterious qualities of California and the West. 

Lungren managed to capture the magnificence of Native Americans, monumental desert bluffs, quintessential desert skies, and the decorative radiance of simple sand and brush. 

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art currently has one of his exemplary works on display, and landscape of black lava. There have been many articles and essays on his work and his works is help by museums as well as private collectors. His works were also on display at the California Nature Museum in Solvang, California in their Member's Collect exhibition.

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