Golden Afternoon, 1908. Childe Hassam. Oil on canvas. Rogers Fund, 1911.
In the fall of 1908 Hassam camped with friends on the Blitzen River in the heart of Harney and Malheur Counties in eastern Oregon. He responded to the locale's vast expanses, barren buttes, blazing light, and opalescent colors in about thirty canvases and watercolors and ten or a dozen cigar-box-size panels. Hassam exulted in the remoteness and extraordinary look of the desert. "Golden Afternoon," one of the most ambitious of his Oregon landscapes, presents a panoramic view of Steens Mountain from the P Ranch, the party's headquarters.