James Hart Dyke: Yosemite brought together a new collection of landscape paintings inspired by Yosemite National Park, following the artist’s painting expedition to California in November 2023. Accompanied by William Mitchell and Californian mountain guide Armin Fisher, James Hart Dyke spent a week exploring Yosemite Valley, painting en plein air from vantage points across and high above the valley floor.
Working from first light each morning, Hart Dyke produced oil sketches and studies directly from the landscape, responding to Yosemite’s immense granite walls, waterfalls, forests and glacial terrain. His subjects included some of the park’s most celebrated landmarks, among them El Capitan, Half Dome, Glacier Point, Sentinel Rock and the Mariposa Grove. Often painting from positions a thousand feet above the valley, he sought to capture the changing light, colour and extraordinary scale of the Sierra Nevada landscape.
The resulting paintings formed the exhibition James Hart Dyke: Yosemite, held at John Mitchell Fine Paintings in London from 21 November to 12 December 2024. Developed from studies made on location and subsequent studio paintings, the collection continued Hart Dyke’s longstanding exploration of remote and dramatic landscapes and his interest in the tradition of the sublime in landscape painting. Yosemite joined the Alps, Himalayas, Patagonia and other wilderness regions that have shaped his work as a contemporary British landscape painter.