Ohlone Mother and Child Walking Through the Santa Cruz Redwoods - Landscape 1930 by Anton Dahl

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Serene depiction of an Ohlone Mother and Child walking a forest path by Anton Dahl (Swedish-American). Ohlone Mother and child … Read more Serene depiction of an Ohlone Mother and Child walking a forest path by Anton Dahl (Swedish-American). Ohlone Mother and child are walking through the Northern California Santa Cruz redwood forest, towards the viewer. Through the forest behind them, there is a clearing with a fallen tree.

Signed "by B. Dahl" in the lower left corner.
Presented in a gold-colored wood frame
Canvas size: 12"H x 18"W

Anton Dahl (Swedish-American, 1894-1967) was born in Sweden and moved to northern California in the 1930s. He taught at the Los Angeles Art Institute from 1948 to at least 1955. He also taught in Santa Cruz and at the Detroit Art Museum School where he met his wife. He was a veteran of World Wars I and II and died on June 15, 1967 in the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. Dahl exhibited with the Painters and Sculptors of Los Angeles (1947) Scandinavian-American Art.

Ohlone Villages: Long before European-style towns sprang up along the coastal plains and valleys of the Santa Cruz Mountains, another people lived here. Season by season they followed the rhythms of nature just as their ancestors had, treading well-worn paths between their traditional villages on the plain and their gathering grounds in the foothills and mountains.

Banded together in “tribelets” of several hundred people, their names ring familiar today: the Aptos of the southern Santa Cruz County coast; the Sokel of the inland valley now known as Soquel; the Sayanta of the San Lorenzo Valley, later called Rancho Zayante; the Cotoni (cho-toni) of Davenport, gateway to the Cotoni-Coast Dairies National Monument.

These tribelets, who shared a way of life but considered themselves quite separate from their neighbors (they spoke very different dialects), are part of a culturally distinct group of indigenous people called the Ohlone. In the mid-1700s, before European contact, the Ohlone numbered some 10,000 people inhabiting a vast swath of land stretching from San Francisco south to Big Sur and extending roughly 50 miles inland. They had already been here for millennia when the first Spaniards showed up; some of their shell mounds are 4,000 years old. (excerpt from "Ohlone People of Santa Cruz County" by by Traci Hukill) See less