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 often led month-long expeditions into the high country with other artists, writers, and poets, and became known as the “Painter of the National Parks.”

The Countryside paintings

The Countryside paintings

Tilden painted thousands of serene countryside scenes in locations throughout Northern and Southern California and beyond, including Oregon (the Rogue River), Arizona, 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 the 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 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 Russian born marine painter Herman Richard Dietz. Wildly expanding the genre, Tilden is one of the few artists in history to have painted beneath the sea. He painted over 200 underwater seascapes in the Pacific Ocean while submerged 150 feet in a custom-designed diving bell he called the Submarine Studio—in Hawaii, Mexico, Baja California, the Channel Islands, and other coastal areas of Southern California.

The Key of Red paintings

The Key of Red paintings

Tilden was known for a time as the “red painter.” While living in Mexico during the revolution, he developed a passion for painting landscapes in the red palette—inspired by Mazatlan sunsets and the jagged red mountains of the Sierra Madre. In the 1920s, during his Hollywood years, he promoted his “key of red” technique, painting in red tones in rhythm to the accompaniment of noted musicians playing classical music. He sought to demonstrate to audiences the synergistic relationship that he saw between color and music, a perceptual and instinctive phenomenon known as synesthesia.

More Information

Tilden Daken, a decorator and fresco painter in his youth, is best known for his landscapes painted en plein air, some more than a century ago, before development changed these lands forever, preserving memories of early California landscapes for generations to come. He painted over 4,000 landscapes directly from nature to capture the light of the day from dawn until dusk. Known primarily as a California Impressionist, he also painted in other parts of the United States and in Mexico, Baja California, Hawaii, and Alaska.