Ray Stanford Strong’s Golden Gate Bridge is the embodiment of depression era chutzpa. Powerful and vibrant, this 1930s painting of San Francisco’s nascent technological wonder signals better days ahead. President Franklin D. Roosevelt selected Golden Gate Bridge to hang in the White House as an optimistic example of New Deal art—without a bread line in sight. In the painting’s foreground, two concrete pylons sink deep beneath the earth’s surface. Th e construction workers standing at the back of the right-hand pylon show us the scale of the structure’s enormity. From a bird’s-eye view, looking down into the shadowy excavation pit, our gaze shifts in the middle distance to a red brick fortress. Fort Point, a Spanish structure rebuilt to protect San Francisco during the Civil War, is being subsumed by the iron and steel bridge. In the distance, beyond the city, are the Marin County Headlands, an area of open space that was preserved as a national park in the 1970s. For Strong, the landscape beyond the construction site (not man’s industrial progress) served as a metaphorical beacon, one that would guide his long career as a painter. Indeed, the theme of the bridge also underscores his achievements as a teacher of painting who, over the decades, would link nineteenth-century landscape traditions and the environmental concerns of nature painters in the twenty-fi rst century. Strong died on July 3, 2006, at the age of 101. He was fortunate. Even in his fi nal years, he never lost his gusto for espousing the populist platform he adopted in the 1930s: a living wage for all workers, support for public schools, preservation of public land, and a national public policy that actively champions peace.1 I fi rst met Ray in 1999, when he agreed to speak to my class on American art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Rolling onto the stage in his wheelchair, he told the students how he had painted the mountains of Oregon. “I hiked ’em all,” he explained, “and eventually my knees just wore out.”2 Ray delivered his declaratives on painting and the environment with the passionate gestures of a revival preacher. Paul Karlstrom captured his enthusiasm in a 1993 interview for the Archives of American Art. Strong told Karlstrom, as he did my class, “Look at the land! Get out, live in it! Sleep in it! Paint it!”3 Ray knew that his western landscapes were not part of the artistic “advanced guard” (a term he liked to use jokingly). In the 1960s he was undiminished when abstract painters from the UCSB Art Department revoked his teaching appointment, explaining to the realist painter, “You will undo all our teaching.”4 Strong always knew what he wanted to do. “I had my sights set on trying to paint light, form, color, geology—the works—of Appreciation