Recently I was contacted by a fellow collector and admirer of Gustaf Tenggren’s art. He told me that he had localized a Tenggren watercolor painting at an online art dealer in USA. The dealer had picked it up some twenty years ago while traveling the west coast. It was nicely signed and looked like an ordinary landscape painting, but a small detail caught the eye of my contact: the word “Chico”. After some negotiating where the price was halved, the painting was acquired and sent to Sweden. It was quite large, 40 x 46 cm; Tenggren used full size watercolor paper sheets while painting in free air.
The buyer had done his homework properly, and his contacting me was just to finally affirm his qualified guess. Maybe he wanted to make me envious? If so, he managed well.
A Disney aficionado, he owned a copy of John Canemaker’s amazing book on Herman Schultheis. Schultheis was a photographer, engineer and inventor, working at the Disney Studio from mid 1930ies to early 1940ies. He collected all sorts of facts, materials and photos related to the film production in a big album, which was found after his death. In 2014, the notebook was published in facsimile along with a biography on Herman Schultheis as “The lost notebook”, a wonderful treasure chest of intricate technical facts from inside the studio.
One page deals with the travels made 1938 by a group of artists, including Tenggren, to various National Parks in Northern California to make research for the feature film “Bambi”. The page contains photos from the trip, taken by Schultheis, one of which is the famed portrait of Gustaf Tenggren painting in the forest. Some of the photos have pencil notations beneath them, indicating where they were taken: “Tuolumne district”, “Muir woods” and “Chico, oak”. This is the only indication I have ever seen confirming Tenggren’s visiting Chico, a town in Northern California with one of the USA’s largest municipal parks, Bidwell Park. There is no doubt that this is where Gustaf Tenggren painted the impressive oak tree trunk surrounded by a rich foliage. The trip also included visits to the Yosemite and Sequoia national parks.
So the tiny pencil notation “Chico, oak” transformed this Californian watercolor landscape, the kind of which Tenggren produced many during his leisure time while working at the Disney Studio, into a true gem: a genuine preliminary study for “Bambi”. No need to mention that this increased its pecuniary value. It also emphasized the importance of research and attention to details.
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