The lost sourdough - Theodore Lambert

Theodore Lambert came to Alaska in 1925, disheveled and totally penniless. He had worked as a sign painter and engraver back home in Illinois, and got jobs as a postman, miner and trapper when he came to Alaska. He got a job as an artist with the Fairbanks Exploration company, and managed to get enough money to study at an art academy in Chicago.

Lambert's painting depict life on the Alaskan tundra, but The Lost Sourdough is, in my opinion, the best. The Lost Sourdough shows, both visually and metaphorically, how tough life really was on the Last Frontier.

The painting uses oil on canvas as its medium, and shows a lone man, struggling to walk through a viscous snowstorm. The man is dressed in a full parka, with a rifle strapped to his back. All around him, the wind whips the snow into a froth of icy resentment against all things living. The man has so much snow blowing around him that his outline is blurred, and his face is inscrutable.

In the background, there is another excess of snow which blocks out almost all view of what is behind the man, creating a sense of loneliness and absolute solitude. In the far background, however, I believe that I can just barely make out the faintest outlines of mountains in the background. This painting is the ultimate representation of the hardships suffered by those early pioneers as they headed out into that beautiful, but untamed and savage land that we call Alaska.