Marius Dahlgren

Primarily known as a landscape painter, Marius Dahlgren was born in Denmark and trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. In 1872, he and his elder brother and fellow artist Carl Christian Dahlgren (1841–1920) immigrated to the United States, settling in Salt Lake City. After a few years, they both moved to Oakland, California, and became active with the art community in San Francisco. Marius Dahlgren maintained a studio in San Francisco and joined the San Francisco Art Association. He exhibited paintings he made during travels throughout the West; he traveled to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska between 1888 and 1889. In 1902, he moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he worked as an illustrator and painted desert landscapes. One of his last commissions was the frontispiece for New Trails in Mexico: An Account of One-Year’s Exploration in North-Western Sonora, Mexico, and South-Western Arizona, 1900–1910, by Carl Lumholtz (1912). The painting, At Sunset, Santa Catalina Mountains, Near Tucson, was printed in color, one of the first such reproductions depicting the desert Southwest.