“Even when I wasn’t gardening, I was thinking about it and about plants. I’ve always thought about plants, and not just edible ones. I thought about flowers and trees. It goes back to a when I was a boy in Ohio.”
—Jim DineIntimately dedicated to his friend Alfred Stern for his birthday, this Jim Dine Roses offers a glimpse into the artist’s personal life, notably of his visits in the 1970s to the sweeping landscape of Bar 7 Ranch in Ennis, Montana. Like many artists who sought periods of respite from their everyday life and environment, the thirty-five thousand acres that made up the ranch’s property offered Dine the perfect escape. Cable television pioneer Alfred Stern was an owner of the ranch and began to know Dine through his visits to the ranch’s wide expanses. Stern was an exceptionally busy New Yorker who, like Dine, found pleasure in the drastically different environment of Montana; though Stern served in high-powered positions at NBC, the Television Communications Corporation, and Warner Cable Corporation, he was just as comfortable clad in jeans and chaps, riding at the ranch, as he was at a black-tie gala in his tuxedo.
In the 1970s, the affable and kindhearted Stern invited artists with whom he was acquainted to the Montana property and brought in many friends from the art world, including the photographer Richard Avedon, to become part owners of Bar 7 Ranch. Avedon benefitted both personally and creatively from the decision, as an exceptionally well-received photograph he took of Bar 7 foreman Wilbur Powell led to his commission by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art for his celebrated book of photographs In the American West.
Dine found natural inspiration within fauna, and flower and plants had been a long-enduring theme for Dine, owed to the fond memories the artist held tending flowers and vegetation with his grandmother in her Ohio garden. Roses, in its precise rendering, also demonstrates the interest and inspiration Dine found in the history of botanical illustrations and his friendship with the botanical illustrator Rory McEwen. Before Roses was editioned in 1978, Dine retained several unique proofs with hand-coloring to keep in his own possession. For the detailed drypoint that Dine gifted to Stern, the forms are embellished with rich hand-coloring in naturalistic greens and pinkish reds, a stunning and particular portrait of a garden rose.
