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In 1904 Childe Hassam traveled to Portland, Oregon, to install a mural he had painted for the study in the house of his friend Charles Erskine Scott Wood, a prominent Portland lawyer; poet, art collector, and painter himself. Together the two men journeyed along the Oregon coast and into the remote Great Sandy Desert region of Harney County in eastern Oregon to paint. They often set up their easels side by side and painted similar landscapes, as demonstrated by the examples shown here. Everything was not always blissful, however. While working on these canvases, Hassam reputedly leaned over and painted directly on Wood's work, incensing his friend, who then refused to complete his picture. Two years later, Judge Charles H. Carey, who had bought Hassam's painting, finally convinced Wood to finish his and then had the two works framed as a pair in gilded and ornamented frames made by the famous Carrig-Rohane Shop in Boston. They descended in Carey's family until last year. In a satisfying full circle, they were then acquired by the Portland Art Museum, an institution that Wood had helped to found in 1892.

Hassam was clearly enthralled by the enormous skies, wide open spaces, and extraordinary colors he found in the high desert country of eastern Oregon, and he and Wood trekked into the region again in 1908. He later wrote, "I was at a point the furthest ...