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 was known as the “Painter of the National Parks.”

The Countryside paintings

The Countryside paintings

Tilden painted thousands of countryside scenes in locations 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. But wildly expanding the genre, Tilden is one of the few artists in history to have painted beneath the sea in a custom-built diving bell he called 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 the Grip of an Octopus,” his short story about his diving adventures, was published in Wide World Magazine and Sunset Magazine in 1926, and in full-page news syndications across the country in 1927.

The Key of Red paintings

The Key of Red paintings

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

More Information

Tilden Daken (1876-1935), a decorator and fresco painter in his youth, is best known as a California Impressionist. 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.