LeConte Stewart (American, 1891–1990)
Grain Elevators, Arimo, Idaho, August 21, 1937
Red pencil on paper, 8 ½ × 11 in.
During a summer sketching trip through Idaho in 1937, Stewart stopped in the farming town of Arimo, where towering grain elevators and railroad boxcars dominated the horizon. He captured the industrial forms with swift, confident lines, rendering them both as functional structures and as elements of a broader Western landscape.
Stewart often traveled across Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming in search of subjects, working directly from life to build a vast archive of drawings and oil sketches. These studies informed his studio paintings and reflected his philosophy that art should truthfully portray the everyday environment. By the late 1930s, Stewart had established himself as one of Utah’s most important realist painters, known for his depictions of both rural landscapes and the manmade structures that shaped them. His work in places like Arimo preserves not only the look of Depression-era agriculture and industry, but also the sense of quiet dignity he found in the ordinary scenes of the American West.
