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SYDNEY LAURENCE
1865–1940
Sydney Mortimer Laurence was the George Inness of Alaska, specializing in tonalist, poetic paintings of the Alaskan wilderness and waterways and of the solitary daily lives of the region’s inhabitants. His beginning art career read like that of a textbook academician: during the 1880s in New York, he exhibited works at the National Academy, helped found the American Fine Arts Society, trained with the marine painter Edward Moran, and studied at the Arts Students League; for his crowning “expat experience,” he then moved with his wife to an artists’ colony in Cornwall, England. Likely it was Laurence’s subsequent adventurous experiences as an artistwar correspondent in Africa and China that triggered his wanderlust and propelled him to settle in Alaska around 1903, leaving his family behind in England. By 1920 Laurence had become a veritable commercial painter, Alaska’s most famous artist with a booming studio in Anchorage, but his more modest early years in Cook Inlet, living in a makeshift camp at the foot of Mount McKinley, defined the soulful tenor of his landscapes. Laurence was interested in Alaska’s unique, sublime nature, and in addition to Mount McKinley, he frequently imaged the area’s noted light phenomenon, the aurora borealis.
Denali (also known as Mount McKinley, its former official name) is the highest mountain peak in North America, with a summit elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190 m) above sea level. It is the tallest mountain in the world from base-to-peak on land, measuring 18,000 ft (5,500 m), and Earth’s highest mountain north of 43°N. With a topographic prominence of 20,194 feet (6,155 m) and a topographic isolation of 4,621.1 miles (7,436.9 km), Denali is the third most prominent and third-most isolated peak on Earth, after Mount Everest and Aconcagua. Located in the Alaska Range in the interior of the U.S. state of Alaska, Denali is the centerpiece of Denali National Park and Preserve.
The Koyukon people who inhabit the area around the mountain have referred to the peak as “Denali” for centuries. In 1896, a gold prospector named it “Mount McKinley” in support of thenpresidential candidate William McKinley; that name was the official name recognized by the federal government of the United States from 1917 until 2015. In August 2015, 40 years after Alaska had done so, the United States Department of the Interior announced the change of the official name of the mountain to Denali.
