Park Sacramento

William Posey Silva returned to the United States in 1909 after training in Europe and in 1913 moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. He spent the next thirty-five years painting the region’s trees, dunes, and coast. This painting is an unusual work for Silva in that it depicts a part of California that Silva rarely visited. A Sacramento park scene, it is a quieter and more domestic subject than his familiar views of the wild Pacific coastline.

Georgia-born Silva began painting at age fifty. Until his retirement in 1907, he successfully ran a family chinaware business, an inherited enterprise. After thirty years as a businessman, he enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris to study with the painter Jean Paul Laurens.