Yaki Point, Grand Canyon by Gunnar Widforss

In what should have been a pause from the hard news — young people in the UK had seen their earnings and job prospects hit hardest; Spain had declared a national emergency and imposed a night-time curfew; and even Donald Trump’s chief of staff had conceded that the United States was “not going to control the pandemic” — Radio 4 made time on the morning of October 26 to interview Caroline Bird, who had been awarded the Forward Prize for 2020 for best poetry collection. She had titled her book The Air Year to refer to the first year of a relationship, “the anniversary prior to paper / for which ephemeral gifts are traditional”, but in the midst of coronavirus that title had taken on a strange double meaning. She said she had hardly written a new poem since March. Part of the problem was the difficulty of responding to what was going on when you were in the middle of an entirely new experience but that experience was being shared by everyone around you; how did you respond in an original way?

  From across the Atlantic, I’d been hearing of similar difficulties from my friend Alan Petersen, curator of fine arts at the Museum of Northern Arizona, in Flagstaff. In an email a few days earlier, he’d told me: “It’s funny, I haven’t worked on any art of my own since March. Around June, I asked a couple of artist friends of mine, who make their living from selling their paintings, how their work was going and if they were painting. They both said no, which really surprised me as they’re both very driven and successful. But we all agreed that we were just so blindsided by the social/emotional/etc effects of the pandemic that it didn’t leave a lot of space for creativity.”

  I’d contacted Alan after receiving a circular with a significant piece of news: after nearly 11 years of research and preparation, he had released his catalogue raisonné — a comprehensive, annotated listing — of the works of the Swedish artist Gunnar Widforss.* On a shelf in my study, I have greeting-card reproductions of two of those works. Even at seven inches by five, they’re impressive: watercolours of near-photographic detail, subtly balancing light and shade and conveying a powerful sense of the depth and majesty of one of the world’s most trumpeted natural wonders: the Grand Canyon. I’d bought those cards, and met Alan, in September 2018, when I went to Arizona on something of a Widforss pilgrimage.

* * * 

In mid-afternoon at the South Rim, it was hard to believe that Americans once had to be encouraged to visit the Grand Canyon. Day-trippers, fresh off the train after a two-hour journey from Williams, pouted at the end of selfie sticks; hikers sweated the last yards up the Bright Angel Trail; diners in the El Tovar Hotel gazed through the windows over the crumbs of their club sandwiches; and browsers in the gift shop dithered over the Grand Canyon Thirstystone Coasters, the Grand Canyon Prickly Pear Taffy, and the beige cotton Grand Canyon National Park Bandana, complete with topographic map of the Colorado River, that carver of the chasm.

  A few browsers, this one included, paused by a stand full of postcards and greeting cards, where offerings included reproductions of two watercolours. I didn’t need to turn to the back to see that they were by Gunnar Widforss. He had brought me to Arizona, just as, in the 1920s and ’30s, he had drawn thousands of others.

  In my years as a commissioning editor, I had sent many a writer to the Grand Canyon. Now I was here for the first time myself, working on a piece ahead of a notable anniversary. It was almost a century since the canyon had been designated a national park — on February 26, 1919, three years after the creation of the National Park Service itself, under the directorship of Stephen Mather, businessman, outdoorsman and born promoter. It was Mather who had set Widforss on his way to becoming “the painter of the national parks”.

  Gunnar Widforss was making a reputation but not much of a living by the age of 41, when he left his native Stockholm in December 1920 intending to travel via the United States to Japan. By the time he reached Los Angeles, he was short of cash, so he did what he had long done in Europe: he found scenic places busy with tourists where he could sell his landscapes. 

  By March 1921 he had reached Yosemite Valley in California, where, one morning, he bumped into Mather. Mather needed someone to show Americans what there was worth seeing and saving in their country’s newly protected places; Widforss needed work. Over the next decade, the Swede (who would become a US citizen in 1929) painted pretty well all the national parks in the west. His paintings were everywhere — from railroad company brochures and hotel-restaurant menus to the galleries of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC.

  The other modern-day champion of Widforss is Alan Petersen, a silver-haired, silver-bearded man with the lean frame of a regular cyclist. In 2009, he organised the first Widforss exhibition in 40 years. He had not only been compiling his catalogue of the artist’s works (more than 1,200); he was also planning — when he got a break from teaching — to write a biography. When we met in Flagstaff, one of the tourist gateways to the canyon, he told me: “My mission over the past 10 years has been to get Gunnar greater recognition.”

 Thanks to Sjöberg’s book and Petersen’s writing I was by that stage well acquainted with the Widforss story. How he had been born in 1879 as Gunnar Mauritz Widforss, one of 13 children whose father, also Mauritz, was a shopkeeper dealing in guns and hunting clothes and whose mother was an amateur painter. (The shop, incidentally, was bought in 1968 by the womenswear chain Hennes, which renamed itself Hennes & Mauritz — now better known as H&M — and added men and children to its customers.)

  How he had fetched up at the Grand Canyon, where he traded paintings with the company running the El Tovar Hotel (one hangs in the lobby still) for a room in a staff dormitory and meals at Bright Angel Lodge.

  How he became renowned for his kindness and his generosity to friends in the park. They soon realised that they had to be careful what they said about a new masterpiece, because Gunnar might hand it over as a present, and he couldn’t afford to do that. 

  And how, having been warned by a doctor that chest pains he’d complained of were angina, and he shouldn’t be working at altitude, he resolved to wrench himself away from the canyon and his friends. On June 30, 1934, he popped back to see them and drop off some paintings. They arranged to meet that evening to play poker. Setting off on just one more errand from the El Tovar Hotel, he had a heart attack and died at the wheel. He was 55.

  Until I arrived in Flagstaff, though, and joined Petersen in an archive room at the museum, everything I had seen of Widforss’s work had been a reproduction. Here were nearly 20 paintings, most of the canyon but also including depictions of a park in Colorado and cypress trees in Monterey in California. There was a real thrill in seeing the luminous layers of his watercolours on an original.

  New to me, too, was the story of how Petersen’s and Widforss’s careers had become entwined. Petersen (63 when we met) grew up in San Diego in California. Intent as a student on one path, he bought his mother a book about Widforss as a present in 1976; he was so taken with the man’s work himself that he decided his own future lay in art rather than architecture. Like Widforss, he had spent a lot of time at the canyon, doing everything from waiting on tables at El Tovar to guiding rafters down the river (“beautiful — but with moments of terror”). He told me he had plans to print every canyon painting Widforss made and to walk the rim marking the GPS co-ordinates of each viewpoint in order to create a map.***

  My own visit to the South Rim began where Widforss’s stay ended: at the Pioneer Cemetery, where he lies in the shade of ponderosa pines. Beside a miniature Swedish flag, planted recently by Petersen, stood three paintbrushes left by other visitors. Behind them, a plaque set into a boulder was inscribed with lines by Robert Browning: “Here, here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,/Lightnings are loosened,/Stars come and go!”

  Also buried in the cemetery are the Kolb brothers, Ellsworth and Emery, who became famous for their photographs of tourists on mule rides (including Theodore Roosevelt and Albert Einstein) and for a film they made while boating the thousand miles of the Colorado River in 1911. Occasionally the Kolbs would offer Widforss a room — but then they had plenty of them: between 1904 and 1976, their rim-side seat at the canyon, which had started as a modest studio, grew into a five-storey, 23-room building complete with bedrooms, bathroom, basement and theatre. Walking around it with Dave Lewis, a cheery park volunteer, and Kim Besom, who looks after archives (and has a Widforss painting as her screensaver), was like touring a Tardis.

  Dave entertained us with stories of the Kolbs’ run-ins with both competitors and the National Park Service, which wanted to demolish the house — and then saw it listed as historic. Now restored, it serves as a bookshop and a gallery, where, between September and January, the work is exhibited of participants in the annual Grand Canyon Celebration of Art. I saw only an occasional watercolour among the oils, but there were one or two works in which tourists appeared, just as they tend to do most days on the edges of the real canyon.

  Tourists are fewer at the North Rim, which is only 10 miles from the South as the condor flies, but some 215 miles (close to five hours) by road. Facilities and viewpoints are also fewer, though, so the tourists tend to cluster. One honeypot is the Grand Canyon Lodge, a rustic secular cathedral with soaring ceiling, where both a restaurant and a terrace offer canyon views. At sundown on the latter, a modern-day Widforss would struggle to find a pitch for a monopod, let alone an easel.

  At 5.50am, there was more elbow room, less chatter. I went out on to the terrace for sunrise, to find that a few more people, saying the odd word in respectful half-whispers, had bagged early seats. In the distance before us twinkled the lights of lodges and restaurants at the South Rim; behind us, orange was glowing on rubble-stone walls. For a moment, the only sound was of a crow pecking among the cracks. As the sun rose, so did the voices. At the South Rim, I’d been looking into the depths and seeing them from a distance. Here, it felt as though the canyon were running out from underneath me. “Does it,” someone asked, “get any better than this?”

  Back indoors, I found on the breakfast menu a Widforss Egg White Omelet [sic]: egg, spinach, tomato and cheddar jack cheese, served with fresh fruit and whole-grain toast. Just the thing to set me up for the 10-mile round trip on the Widforss Trail. 

  Before that, though, at 11.30, I had an appointment with a tribute artist. At one of the North Rim’s viewpoints, a ranger, Kim Girard, had swapped her usual hat for a trilby and pulled on over her working clothes an approximation of what “Weedy” Widforss — he was 5ft 4in tall — would have worn: baggy flannel shirt, tie, glasses and gaiters. On the rim wall she rested an easel with a reproduction of a Widforss painting she was “finishing off”; behind, it, on a bigger board, she had photographs of him and his family and more examples of his work. In a presentation designed to appeal to both children and adults, she gave a brief run-through of his life and his association with the canyon and reminded them that they could walk a trail named in his honour.

  She kindly dropped me off later at the start of that trail, which follows the canyon rim, then winds though a forest of fir, spruce and aspen — where the artist loved to paint — before emerging at another canyon overlook, now signposted “Widforss Point”. The first section is covered by a park-service leaflet taking in some of the most striking features, among them a viewpoint through the trees and over the canyon to the San Francisco Peaks, some 70 miles away, near Flagstaff.

  By luck, I’d arrived when the aspens were on the turn. Lean silver trunks were lampstands for brilliant yellow leaves, which seemed not so much to be lit by the sun as to be glowing from within. Mesmerised by them, stock-still, I didn’t notice that a young deer had come out of the undergrowth behind me. When I finally turned to move on, it bolted.

  On the return, I paused again at the viewpoint towards the peaks. I had the strange sensation that I was looking not at the Grand Canyon but at a Widforss painting made real: coppery-coloured pyramidal formations in front, pinker formations behind, a ridge hazy beyond and, in the far distance, at the top of the frame, the mountains. A world according to Widforss.

* The catalogue raisonné can be found online.

** The Art of Flight (Particular Books) is two books in one. In the second, The Raisin King, Sjöberg is intent on ensuring that another Swede is properly credited in the story of America’s national parks. He follows the journey to California and New York of Gustav Eisen, who was an expert on worms and then on beads before becoming a wine-grower. Eisen was a leading figure in the San Francisco Academy of Sciences and claimed to have been instrumental in the foundation of Sequoia National Park. That claim is disputed — but he’s buried in the park, at the foot of a mountain named after him. “After his death,” Sjöberg writes, “others inflated their own rather more modest contributions at the expense of his, and I, for one, find that maddening.”

*** In May 2022, Alan Petersen added to his catalogue raisonné website a map showing locations where Widforss had painted in the inner canyon.

Moran Point, Grand Canyon by Gunnar Widforss