The10 Hues of the Hill Country

When staff members of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum were piecing together a recent exhibition on the former president’s favorite painter, they came across a picture from the 1951 holiday season in the family archives. Framed by a striped sofa chair and a scraggly Christmas tree decked with sparkly garland, Lyndon B. Johnson and his family crowded in the den of their ranch house for a photo op. Hanging over the fireplace behind them was a painting by Porfirio Salinas of a prickly pear cactus in springtime bloom with the Hill Country stretched out in the background. The painting, a gift from a family friend, was the first the family owned from the Texas landscape painter. It marked the start of a bond between the Johnsons and Salinas rooted in their shared appreciation for the Texas countryside.

“There’s a natural connection between the Johnsons and their love for the environment—and especially the Texas Hill Country—with the work that Salinas did,” says Lara Hall, curator for the library and museum. During his administration, Johnson signed into law nearly 300 conservation measures and greatly expanded national park areas. As first lady, Lady Bird Johnson championed conservation in her own right. Back home, Salinas painted Johnson’s Texas. Blankets of bluebonnets lining narrow streams. Valleys between limestone cliffs that rise from the southeastern rim of the Edwards Plateau. Dirt ranch roads winding back to vistas familiar to those who have peered out from a Hill Country outlook.

Johnson gravitated to Salinas’ work because of the artist’s fidelity to not only the natural markers of the land but also the spirit of the country where the president had grown up. Salinas’ impressionist takes on Texas served as a backdrop to Johnson’s ascent in politics—his paintings hung in LBJ’s various homes and offices in Washington, D.C., and were featured in the background of his meetings with world leaders. Salinas shares his legacy with one of the most prominent Texas figures, who was enthralled by the same sprawling hills and wildflower-strewn fields the artist dedicated his life to documenting. Yet Salinas remains relatively unknown to the public. “Even some art people don’t know who he is, which is unusual,” says Charles Morin, a gallery owner in Fredericksburg who sells Salinas’ work. “I guess because he’s been gone since 1973 and out of sight, out of mind.”

Though Salinas is recognized among some history and art experts as one of the earliest Mexican American painters, he is considered more of a commercial painter among early Texas landscape artists. He was such a prolific plein air painter that he left behind what some estimate as thousands of paintings of the Hill Country. Salinas never reached the renown of masters like fellow Texan Julian Onderdonk, whose work consists of more atmospheric depictions of springtime compared to Salinas’ more photographic renditions. Still, Salinas remains a quintessential Texas painter who deserves wider recognition for distilling what Texas means to Texans.

“In one way, the importance of Salinas is in that documentation of the Texas landscape and rolling hills of the Hill Country and flora and fauna,” says Michelle Cuellar Everidge, president and CEO of the Witte Museum in San Antonio. “On the other hand, Salinas as a figure of Texas art is really important. We should study and know about Salinas because he represents a type of artist that we don’t see very often. He’s really a Texas painter.”

On the day I visit the Charles Morin Fine Art Gallery on Main Street, around a dozen Salinas paintings are on display, including Bluebonnet Time, Lazy Day Blues, and Bluebonnet Creek. The large paintings within ornate frames span almost a decade of Salinas’ life leading up to perhaps the peak of his career, when LBJ became the chief admirer of his work. The latter painting, dated 1957, depicts clusters of bluebonnets sloping downward to the banks of a thin creek that reflects the sunlight so vividly you can practically hear water trickling as a drifting breeze shakes the leaves on a large tree nearby.

Though he painted with oil, Salinas’ blues and greens are subdued compared to the gallery’s other paintings by various landscape artists. In Salinas’ work, there is less contrast and texture to the fields of wildflower blossoms at the forefront of his paintings. It’s a product, Morin reckons, of skilled effortlessness. “For many artists, it’s a struggle,” Morin says. “Even if they’re great artists, they have a hard time putting the brush on the canvas and making it happen, or maybe it takes them forever to finish a painting.” But for Salinas, the veteran gallerist says, portraying Texas came easily.

Salinas’ loyal interpretations of the Hill Country inspire confidence that the exact view he captured is still out there somewhere. He became the painter of choice for elected federal officials from Texas, offering a physical representation of the landscapes they missed while serving in Washington, D.C. Now a blend of countryside and suburban outgrowth, Salinas’ Hill Country has changed significantly in the decades since his death 52 years ago. And yet, his work was so precise that a painting that recently came through Morin’s gallery prompted a discussion among local ranch hands and fence builders adamant they could pinpoint where it was painted. They couldn’t be sure, of course, but they settled on a viewpoint from inside a pasture near Llano.

Biographical information about Salinas’ early life is scant, but it’s known he was the son of Mexican tenant farmers and likely faced some level of poverty growing up on San Antonio’s predominantly Mexican American West Side in the early 1910s, at a time when Texans like him endured the crush of institutionalized racism. But there were early signs he’d push against his circumstances: He was said to have spent much of his childhood neglecting textbooks in favor of sketchbooks. Some of his earliest work on bluebonnets dates to when he was just 15 years old and gifted his mother a landscape scene.

In an oral history interview from the 1980s, his widow, Maria Salinas, disputed much of the conventionally accepted biographical details of his early career—that he sold his first painting to his third grade teacher; that he worked as an assistant to English-born landscape painter Robert W. Wood, who paid him $5 a canvas to take on the tedious work of adding tiny bluebonnets to his paintings; that he studied under the Spanish-born painter José Arpa. But what remains true, Maria corroborated, is that Salinas was largely self-taught and ambitious. He was influenced by both Wood, who allowed him to paint in his downtown San Antonio studio at a young age and with whom he traveled to the Hill Country to paint; and by the city’s active art scene, which organized
wildflower-painting competitions.

“He’s in this culture of bluebonnet painters as he’s coming of age,” Cuellar Everidge says. “He’s not necessarily trying to paint totally realistic; he’s giving it an extra something. But he started with this study of plein air and with these painters who were using impressionism. He would’ve been right in the mix.”

Salinas’ early practice of painting small pictures for tourists helped him transcend the doldrums of the Great Depression, but his decades-long professional kinship with art dealer Dewey Bradford solidified his career. Though they were known to have a complicated, thorny relationship, the Austin-based dealer introduced Salinas’ work to high-profile Texans in and around the state capital in the 1940s. This led to Salinas’ paintings adorning the office walls of longtime U.S. Speaker and Texan Sam Rayburn, who hung a Salinas landscape in the U.S. Capitol. Salinas would often make the trek to the Johnson family ranch near Stonewall to paint in the open air while his paintings traveled with the family to their D.C. residence. He was even meant to present a painting of a horse drinking from a creek to President John F. Kennedy during his ill-fated trip to Dallas.

Recognition for Salinas’ landscapes flourished when he was memorialized in a 1964 feature in The New York Times as LBJ’s preferred artist. His work would achieve such high demand that prominent political figures like Gov. John Connally were left waiting to get their hands on one. Despite the increased fame, Salinas remained a modest artist who maintained a simplicity to his approach. With a great memory for color, Salinas kept to 10 hues, striving for a middle ground so his pigments would appear neither too strong nor too weak. “You don’t need too many,” Salinas told The New York Times. “You only get confused.”

Today, Salinas is likely part of many private collections, with his pieces priced at auction for as little as $6,000 to as much as $80,000. Morin estimates he’s sold around 500 works by Salinas in more than two decades of business and says his work is still in demand among Texas art collectors. Unfortunately, the more than half-dozen Salinas paintings the state owns are not available for public viewing. Several Salinas landscapes hang in the Texas Capitol and one in the Governor’s mansion, though none are currently part of public tours.

In the San Antonio area, however, Salinas is publicly celebrated. The Witte Museum, which focuses on Texas natural history and heritage, has perhaps one of the largest works by Salinas on display. The sweeping 1957 painting titled Spring Scene of Texas Hill Country, measuring roughly 13 feet tall by 30 feet long, initially served as a diorama backdrop for the Buckhorn Saloon & Museum when it was located at the Lone Star Brewery near downtown. For decades, stuffed longhorns and other wildlife obstructed Salinas’ depiction of an expanse of bluebonnets stretching back past scraggly mesquites toward a horizon of rolling hills.

The artwork somehow survived a four-alarm fire in 2011 during a stint in the historical Wolfson Building. It remained there until an expansion of the Witte Museum was completed in 2016. The painting’s vibrant blues were dulled by a layer of soot, but the Witte managed to preserve the painting, and now the impressive work can be viewed in the museum’s Mays Family Center.

At the museum, Salinas’ depictions of Texas landscapes are treated as a primary source of the past. “The landscape quality, who he is as a Mexican American painter, and really the wholeness of that together is what makes him so special to us,” Cuellar Everidge says. “When you think about all these different eras of his life, that he always returns to this landscape really says something about how he sees his world.”

A 1944 piece depicting a side view of the Alamo from a shaded courtyard hangs over the admissions desk at the Fort Sam Houston Museum—an 11-by-4-foot token from the two years Salinas was stationed at Fort Sam Houston during World War II. The Briscoe Western Art Museum is home to Hill Country with Cattle, which was one of former Gov. Dolph Briscoe’s favorites by the artist.

“The themes in Salinas’ work likely resonated deeply with Briscoe, who had a strong connection to Texas history, culture, and land,” says Liz Jackson, the Briscoe’s president and CEO. “Salinas’ art symbolized Texas pride and identity, which continue to make his works especially appealing to all of us who call Texas home.”

Salinas’ art is perhaps most at home in the vastness of the Hill Country itself, in the realm of his biggest admirer. That’s where Prickly Pear, the first Salinas owned by the Johnsons, claims its spot in the ranch house dubbed the Texas White House.

Stretching along a ribbon of the Pedernales River, LBJ Ranch represents Johnson’s life on its 700 acres through a reconstruction of his birthplace home, the old one-room schoolhouse he attended as a 4-year-old, and the Johnson family cemetery. In the springtime, masses of wildflowers—more than 70 species—light up its pastures in yellow patches of coreopsis and black-eyed Susan and red bursts of Texas paintbrush. In the summer, the coastal Bermuda grass sways through the heat while stately live oaks offer shade to roaming Hereford cattle.

Niki Ryan is a museum technician at the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park. She and her husband, Mike, had worked at nine national parks by the time they made it to the Johnson compound, about 60 miles west of Austin. They expected it to be a temporary stop but have been there for 11 years.

When they were new employees, a curator pointed out Prickly Pear to Niki from its spot over the fireplace mantel in the den and described the Johnsons’ fondness for the painting. When LBJ became vice president, he relocated the painting from the ranch’s wood-paneled walls to the three-story French château-style residence, known as The Elms, where the family temporarily resided.

“That was his way of taking Texas to D.C.,” Ryan says.

The Texas White House was closed to the public in 2018 due to structural issues, but the complex is at the tail end of a years-long rehabilitation project with an expected reopening that could extend to 2027. The delicate orange blooms Salinas added atop the cactus pads should pop following an art conservator’s work to restore the painting.

A half century after his death, Salinas may not be widely celebrated as a great Texas artist, but he’s still remembered in his native Bastrop, where residents preserve his legacy by engaging young Texans with his work.

At the Bastrop Public Library, hanging behind the crescent-shaped checkout desk, is a typical but small Salinas painting of a prickly pear cactus with orange blossoms on a pasture dotted with what look like white prickly poppy blooms. Yellow wildflowers, possibly coreopsis, are scattered in the foreground while a line of trees makes its way toward a vista painted with the haziness you might see from a lookout in early summer before the real heat has set in.

The untitled work made its way to the library in mysterious fashion. An undated newspaper archive in the library’s reference room indicates “the jewel of a painting” arrived a few years before inside a box of donated books from an unknown sender. It was a serendipitous homecoming. Though Salinas lived most of his life in San Antonio, he was born in Bastrop County.

These days, teachers and volunteers memorialize the painter through the annual Salinas Youth Art Contest held at the Lost Pines Art Center in Bastrop. The push to honor Salinas first emerged during the planning of Bastrop’s sesquicentennial in 1981, for which Salinas was included in a display recognizing the town’s Mexican heritage. The following year, the event grew into an annual exhibition of the artist’s work with the inaugural Salinas Festival, featuring a retrospective of 52 of his paintings. The festival stopped in the early 1990s, but the art contest continues.

“Salinas was very successful toward the end of his life because he became a name,” says Tommy Vasquez, who spearheaded the first Salinas exhibition and has long pushed for local recognition of the artist’s work. But his gift was the simplicity with which he long depicted the richness of the world around him, Vasquez adds.

Now in its 39th year, the Salinas Youth Art Contest carries the artist’s name into Bastrop classrooms. More than 6,000 students from kindergarten to 12th grade work on their own artistic creations with the best work considered for scholarships and an exhibition in the springtime. Organizers say the art contest draws from the early validation Salinas received from his own teachers.

“Somebody took notice and encouraged a young artist who had talent and had interest in doing his art,” organizer Mike Salvo says. “We find a lot of kids in the contest who have talent, but they have no interest. For the ones who do have talent and do have interest, we want to give them all the encouragement in the world.”