Northern California Nature Garden, c. 1925.

His Art

The High Sierra paintings

The High Sierra paintings

 Tilden painted practically every peak, canyon, lake, and river in the High Sierra. During the epic winter of 1922 in the Lake Tahoe region, he completed a series of 100 paintings known as the “Northern California Alps” collection–one of his greatest legacies. He led months-long expeditions into the high country with other artists, writers, and poets, and was known as the “Painter of the National Parks.”

The Countryside paintings

The Countryside paintings

Tilden painted thousands of countryside scenes throughout Northern and Southern California and beyond, including Oregon, Arizona, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York.

The Redwoods paintings

The Redwoods paintings

Tilden’s passion for the redwoods spanned a lifetime. He painted hundreds of scenes of giant sequoias and coast redwoods, including: the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, Marin County’s Muir Woods, Yosemite’s Mariposa Grove, the Armstrong Redwoods, Big Basin Redwoods, Calaveras Grove, Kings Canyon, Humboldt Redwoods, Sonoma County’s Russian River, and many more. He was active in Save the Redwoods League, a nonprofit organization founded in 1918, whose mission is to protect and restore the redwoods.

The Marine Art paintings

The Marine Art paintings

Tilden briefly studied marine art—sea painting—under the tutelage of Russian born marine painter Herman Richard Dietz. Wildly expanding the genre, he is one of the few artists in history to have painted scenes beneath the sea in a custom-built diving bell, the “Submarine Studio.” He is said to have painted 300 underwater seascapes while submerged up to 200 feet in the Pacific Ocean–at Point Reyes and Tomales Bay in Marin County, the Channel Islands in Southern California, and Bahia de Todos Santos and Punta Banda in Ensenada, Baja California. In 1926, The Wide World Magazine, Sunset, and Youth’s Instructor published his short story about his diving adventures, “In the Grip of an Octopus.” In 1927, the story published in dozens of full-page news syndications across the country.

The Key of Red paintings

The Key of Red paintings

While living in Mazatlán during the Mexican Revolution, Tilden developed a passion for painting in the red palette, inspired by the Sinaloa sunsets in the Sierra Madre Mountains. In the 1920s in Hollywood, he painted to music before live audiences, revealing his neurological condition known as synesthesia, the instinctive and synergistic relationship between color and music. He became  known as the “Key of Red” artist.

More Information

Tilden Daken (1876-1935) is best known as a California Impressionist.  As a child, he developed a passion for nature, classical music, and painting in the backwoods. By his teens, he was a fresco and mural painter in San Francisco. He painted over 4,000 landscapes en plein air, directly from nature to capture the light of the day from dawn until dusk. He also painted in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Mexico, Baja, Hawaii, the South Seas, and parts of the East Coast.