1990s Limited Edition Signed Print of "Heading Up French Glen" Watercolor After William Matthews

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Professionally matted and framed limited edition print of "Heading Up French Glen", signed by the artist, William Matthews. The frame … Read more Professionally matted and framed limited edition print of "Heading Up French Glen", signed by the artist, William Matthews. The frame is embellished with a border of raised relief horses.

"Heading Up French Glen" was created in 1992 and is considered a showcase of Matthews' distinctive technique — specifically his use of blank space, where the bare color of the watercolor paper itself gives the impression of a sunlit hillside. French Glen is a real location in southeastern Oregon, a remote ranching community near the Steens Mountain, which sits squarely in the Great Basin cowboy country Matthews began documenting after his 1983 trip to the Elko poetry gathering.

The painting was featured in Matthews' Trespassing exhibition, where it was highlighted alongside other key works as an example of his mastery of watercolor's floating, transparent nature — a medium he has described as requiring deep confidence and daily practice of up to ten hours. The image became one of Matthews' most widely reproduced works.

Size: With frame 43 3/4" W by 23 3/8" H by 1 1/8" D
Visible image is 34 3/8" by 13.5"


About the artist:
William Matthews was born in New York City in 1949, grew up in San Francisco, and began his professional career in Los Angeles designing album covers for Warner Bros. and Capitol Records before eventually settling in the mountains outside Denver, Colorado, where he has painted full time since 1980. A turning point came in 1985 when he attended the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, where his encounters with working cowboys of the Great Basin — from Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, and California — became the defining subjects of his art. For much of his subject matter, Matthews aggressively pursues the people and settings of the great ranches throughout the West, and his resulting watercolors have been described as a subtle, philosophical study of western ranch life with a depth few others match. His cowboy work has been the subject of two major monographs — *Cowboys & Images* (1994) and *Working the West* (2007) — and Forbes has hailed him as the new Remington of American painting. See less