Porfirio Salinas

Born near Bastrop in 1910 to a Mexican-American farming family that soon moved to San Antonio, Porfirio Salinas was largely self-taught. As a teenager he worked in the studio of landscape painter Robert Wood, learning to stretch canvases, mix paint, and frame pictures — and famously earning a few dollars a canvas adding the bluebonnets Wood disliked painting himself. By 1930 he had begun his professional career. Salinas became the definitive interpreter of the Texas Hill Country in spring, painting fields of bluebonnets, autumn red oaks, and prickly pear beneath soft, atmospheric light. He is believed to have produced between two and three thousand works. His reputation reached the highest levels of Texas politics: Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson were avid collectors, and the New York Times called him the president's favorite painter. He held a solo exhibition at San Antonio's Witte Museum in 1962, and his paintings illustrated the 1967 book Bluebonnets and Cactus. After his death in 1973, the City of Austin proclaimed Porfirio Salinas Day in his honor. Today his bluebonnet landscapes are prized by collectors across Texas and beyond.