Sydney Laurence

Early life (1889-1904)

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Sydney Mortimer Laurence studied at the Art Students League of New York. He married Alexandrina Fredricka Dupre in 1889.
Sydney Mortimer Laurence exhibited regularly by the late 1880s. Mr. Laurence and Alexandria traveled to Cornwall, settling in 1889 in the English artists' colony of St. Ives from 1889 to 1898. Over the next decade he exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists and was included in the Paris Salon in 1890, 1894, and 1895, winning an award in 1894.

Laurence abandoned his family and came to Alaska in 1903 or 1904.

Alaska (1904-1940)

Mr. Laurence was the first professionally trained artist to make Alaska his home. He moved to Alaska in 1904 for reasons still unknown. Records from 1907 show he lived in Tyonek on the North Shore of Cook Inlet.  Living the difficult life of the pioneer prospector, he painted little in his early years in Alaska. From 1911to 1914 he began to focus once again on his painting. He moved from Valdez to the Anchorage in 1915 and by 1920 he was Alaska's most prominent painter.

Mr. Laurence painted a variety of Alaskan scenes in his long and prolific career, among them sailing ships and steamships in Alaskan waters, totem poles in the Alaska panhandle, incredible headlands and the peaceful coves and streams of Cook Inlet, cabins and caches under the northern lights, and Alaska Natives, miners, and trappers engaged in their often solitary lives in the northern wilderness.
His trademark became his inspiring images of Denali.  These painting were from the bills above the Tokositna River. It is these images that personifies Mr. Laurence.  Sydney Laurence forged a uniquely personal style by applying the tonalist techniques he had learned in New York and Europe to the wilderness of Alaska. He, more than any other artist, defined for Alaskans and others the image of Alaska as "The Last Frontier."
In May 1927, Laurence married Jeanne Kunath, a French-born artist who had emigrated to the United States in 1920. Sydney Laurence died in Anchorage on December 10, 1940.