Class of Winter 1938
Alson Skinner Clark
b. Chicago, Illinois, 1876
d. Pasadena, California, 1949
After the Shower, Cuernavaca (or Cuernavaca), 1923
Oil on canvas
36 x 46 inches
Alson Clark painted After the Shower, Cuernavaca on an extended painting trip to Mexico with fellow artist Orrin White. They had traveled by boat to Manzanillo, then by slow stages inland to Mexico City, and then down to Cuernavaca, about forty miles farther south. Like other artists whose work was collected by GHS, Clark worked internationally and drew upon numerous influences in the creation of an artistic vision that was wholly original. His view of the sixteenth-century Cuernavaca Cathedral looks across the city’s rooftops; half the composition is a remarkable cloudy sky, while the whole lower fifth is a pattern of crisscrossing tile in complementary colors. It is probably no accident that in 1953 the GHS seniors bought Orrin White’s painting of Cuernavaca, The Pilgrimage, also made on that shared trip to Mexico.
