Julian Onderdonk was an Impressionist painter who gained a reputation as the “Father of Texas Art” in the early 20th century. He was born and raised in South Texas and gained notoriety for his bluebonnet paintings.
But it’s a 1915 painting, Gulf Clouds in the Hills on the West Prong of the Medina River that captured John R. Millard’s attention.
It shows a section of the river in Bandera County where Millard lives — and he believes part of his property is depicted in that very Onderdonk piece.
He wrote about the experience Texas Co-op Power Magazine and joined the Standard to discuss his findings. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Were you familiar with Onderdonk’s work before discovering the similarities to your property?
John R. Millard: No I actually was not, it was only after I saw the painting while doing a little research regarding our property online. I discovered that there was this painting that had an uncanny resemblance to my very property and started doing a little research, that’s when I went down the Julian Onderdonk rabbit hole.
So tell me about your initial discovery. You were just clicking around online or what?
We had purchased the property in January of 2024 and I was very interested in the history of the property and so I was searching for the West Prong of the Medina River.
The West Prong actually runs through our property. I was interested in a little history on the ranch. Then completely by accident I came across a Flickr image of a painting and it was Gulf Clouds in the Hills on the West Prong of the Medina River.
It stopped me cold. I immediately knew that was our property, mainly because I’d been out that morning hiking the very area where he had to be standing at the time he painted it, but it hit me very distinctly that this was our property.
There’s this green hill with like sort of tapering peaks and then the curve of the river and is that really the landmarks that caught your eye?
The contour of the hills certainly caught my eye because they’re very distinctive, they kind of do a stair step from side to side. There’s four hills in the background. Then there is a bluff and a curve of limestone where the river runs through.
Then in the riverbed itself there are these very distinctive limestone striations that look like points. When I looked at the painting, I noticed the limestone bluff, the curve of the river, but mostly the riverbed with these very distinctive limestone striations.
It became very evident to me that this was our property. I hiked back out there the next day and took a bunch of photographs, then compared them side-by-side to the actual painting. I was convinced from that, that this indeed was painted on our property.
Well that took you into this historical investigation. What did you find?
Well it was very interesting to me, so I looked up as much as I could find out about Julian Onderdonk and I learned quite a bit about him.
He was born in San Antonio in 1882. Some people know him as the bluebonnet artist. He has many paintings of bluebonnets and live oaks and rivers in the Texas Hill Country. When George W. Bush was president, I think he had four Julian Onderdonk paintings hanging in his office.
I became rather fascinated by that and then started trying to figure out when did he come here? Why did he come here? That led me into a lot of research regarding the property’s history.
I went back in the deed records as far as I could go. I actually reached out to some historical people in Medina and in Bandera and asked if they knew anything about this painting and this artist.
One of the people at the library in Bandera reached out to me and said, “I have something you’d be very interested in, why don’t you come in and take a look?”
I went in and she provided me with a 1928 Frontier Times article by a gentleman who was a settler at the time and also a Texas ranger during the 1870s. His name was Samuel Sutton. He described living on a property and having an encounter with Native Americans who appeared while he and his wife were washing clothes in the river and looked up on the bluff.
And, of course, back in those days it was a little dangerous in Texas, so he was very nervous. He described this event and gave a good description of the property and what he described as our property. He described that at the time, the property was owned by a man named Williams and it was known as the Williams Ranch.
You discovered that there were other paintings that you believe happened on this same property?
Yes I think there are at least three and some of the titles are very revealing. For example, two that talk about the Williams Ranch.
So from my research into the history of the property at the time that Mr. Sutton was here and had his encounter with the Indians on the bluff, it was owned by the Williams family. So my theory — I don’t have any proof to fully establish this — but my theory is that Onderdonk was traveling around as he often did. He was painting and set up his easel in this area and painted these four paintings.
Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to identify the location of the other paintings, but I’ll tell you this: It looks very similar to this area just in general. So I believe it’s very plausible that he, on a trip out in this area, got out his easel and paints and painted the landscape.
You know, so much has changed over the centuries, but does this sort of show some continuity and just the beauty of the area that people have continued to appreciate?
I really do think that, and I think that’s very significant for a couple of reasons.
First of all, with regard to Julian Onderdonk, the locations of his paintings have changed so much over the past century that they really can’t be identified on the ground anymore.
This particular painting — I think, in my opinion — very clearly is identified with my property. So it’s among the only, I believe, paintings where we know the exact location of the painting. I think from a Texas art history standpoint, the painting is very significant from that view.
Then the other thing is that it’s, I think, a reminder that the Texas Hill Country that we see today is the same landscape that inspired one of Texas’s greatest artist.
With regard to our property, the land really hasn’t changed very much. The clouds still move across the hills the way they did in 1915 and it looks very similar as it did when he captured it with his paint and easel. I think that’s very important.
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