About this work
The eye settles first on figures — small but purposeful against an immensity of sky and stone. Payne's language of the Southwestern landscape characteristically spoke of brilliant cliffs and skies towering over a small group of figures on horseback, and *The Navajos* is a quintessential expression of that grammar. Payne uses the Navajo as compositional devices to counterbalance the prominent geology of the canyon, their silhouettes threading through the open terrain with an unhurried authority. The palette carries the particular heat of the Four Corners region — burnt sienna, ochre, and salmon sandstone catching the Southwest sun, offset by broad washes of turquoise sky. Avoiding black altogether, Payne combined neutral shades to create shadows, and painted in broad strokes that grew more prominent and almost mosaic-like as his career progressed. The result is landscape rendered not as record but as feeling — raw, open, and sunstruck.
Payne's fascination with the Southwest was cemented in 1916 when he accepted an assignment from the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Company to paint western scenery, arriving in Gallup, New Mexico, with his wife and young daughter that June.
Using a wagon to travel from site to site, Payne lived on and near Navajo and Hopi reservations for months, sketching the land and its people.
Drawn to the Navajo Nation — considered nomadic and covering larger geographic areas — he set himself apart from fellow artists who gravitated toward Taos.
Figures became a regular and integral part of Payne's compositions only in the desert Southwest, where humanity remained small and unobtrusive when set against the vast loneliness of the terrain, and Native Americans in particular seemed at one with the environment.
Elsie Payne later recalled that he "returned to that glorious country nearly every year that he was in America the rest of his life."
*The Navajos* belongs in a room that can hold silence — a study, a great room with high ceilings, or a hallway long enough to give the work the visual distance it deserves. It rewards natural light, which catches the warm-toned sandstone pigments and amplifies the openness of the composition. Payne's paintings of the Southwest shaped the view of Western landscapes in the American imagination, and this work carries that weight without grandstanding. It speaks to the viewer who wants landscape with a human pulse in it — not wilderness for its own sake, but a world where people and place have reached a kind of equilibrium. The mood is contemplative, sun-warmed, and quietly monumental.
