Jared Brinkley had never been more anxious on a plane. Not typically a nervous flier, the California video game production manager stowed his valuable cargo as he prepared for takeoff on a recent flight from Seattle to Dallas. Wrapped in a cocoon of foam, cardboard, and packing tape and tucked into the first-class cabin coat closet was a hundred-year-old painting that could be worth six figures.
“I carried it around the airport terrified,” Brinkley, 49, said. “The whole trip was stressful.”
The artwork, an original Julian Onderdonk oil painting from 1921 titled A Field of Bluebonnets, San Antonio, is representative of the work of the Texas impressionist, who is beloved for his pastoral scenes that showcase the iconic indigo flowers.
“If you’ve ever seen a painting of bluebonnets in Texas, it’s because of Onderdonk,” says Atlee Phillips, the director of Texas art at Dallas-based Heritage Auctions. “He made it a genre unto itself.”
This twelve-by-sixteen canvas had been in Brinkley’s family for generations, though it was at one point nearly lost. The parents of his grandmother, Carlotta Preston, received it as a gift in 1921 shortly after Preston was born in Chicago. Preston kept it through adulthood, taking it with her to California and then Seattle. During her move to Washington, the painting mistakenly ended up in the back of a truck bound for Goodwill. Though Preston didn’t know its value or anything about the artist who signed it, she refused to part ways with the piece.
After she died, in 2005, the painting passed to Preston’s daughter, Kathy Brinkley, who kept it in her dining room as a reminder of her mother. Kathy, now in her seventies, discovered the painting’s significance after researching Onderdonk on a lark during the COVID pandemic shutdown. She recently decided to give the painting to her son, Jared, but he and his wife didn’t feel it was a fit with the more modern aesthetic of their home.
So after more research, the Brinkleys turned to Phillips, an Onderdonk specialist. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, great Onderdonk,’ ” Phillips recalled of first seeing photos of the painting. But she needed to be certain it was authentic, so she sent the images to Henry Halff, a fine art gallerist in San Antonio and perhaps the foremost expert on Onderdonk in the state.
“It took me one second,” Halff said, to verify that the painting of a field of bluebonnets and a caliche road winding into the distance was the genuine article.
Onderdonk was prolific, producing hundreds of works before he died, at forty, in 1922. They range from small, postcard-size pieces to large canvases. His most famous paintings came after he moved back to his hometown of San Antonio, in 1909, after studying for several years in New York under master artists such as the American impressionist painter William Merritt Chase. Onderdonk took impressionism and applied it to Texas, especially to the fields of bluebonnets near town.
In the art market, an Onderdonk bluebonnet can attract significant interest from collectors. Phillips has been part of several lucrative sales in the last couple years alone: a 9-by-12 painting sold for $100,000 in 2023, a 7-by-10 painting sold for $75,000 in 2022, and that same year, a large canvas that measured 29 by 40 feet sold for $400,000. All of them were of bluebonnets.
An auction for Brinkley’s Onderdonk is set for Saturday, with a starting price of $30,000. “That is very, very, very low,” Halff said. “It’s going to sell for significantly more than that.” The family members will be watching from their respective homes in California and Washington.
It’s still possible to find an Onderdonk bluebonnet in the wild, but Atlee says the larger ones are pretty much all accounted for. There are still, however, an untold number of small, postcard-size ones, which can bring in some serious coin: Atlee has seen some sell for up to $30,000. So next time you’re at an art fair—or, who knows, at a Goodwill—keep a weather eye out for small brushstrokes of blue. They might just be worth a pile of green.
