Snowed In—Calaveras Hotel is a color woodcut created circa 1935 by American artist William Seltzer Rice. It is pencil signed and titled and was printed by the artist on Japanese laid paper in an edition of twelve or fewer impressions. The image size of Snowed In—Calaveras Hotel measures 7 x 8-7/8 inches.
The exact location of this rustic, snowed-in hotel in Calaveras County is unknown. William Rice loved the outdoors and was particularly fond of the landscape of the Sierra Nevada in California. Calaveras is a county located in the both the Gold Country and the High Sierra. Other of his works of this region of California include Big Trees in Snow, Calaveras Resort, Mountain Shacks in Winter, Old Sawmill Groveland, Sierra Snowbank, and Winter at Dorrington.
William Seltzer Rice, painter, printmaker, educator, and author, was born to Sarah Graeff Seltzer and John Maurer Rice on 23 June 1873 in Manheim, Pennsylvania. He moved to Philadelphia in the fall of 1892 to attend the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and was awarded a three-year scholarship to the school the following year. In June 1894, Rice received a Certificate in Industrial Drawings and the following June he received a Certificate in Decorative Painting and Applied Design.
After graduating in 1895, Rice was hired as staff artist for the Philadelphia Times but continued taking classes with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute. In August 1900, Rice moved to California and his friend Frederick H. Meyer offered him a job as Assistant Art Supervisor in the Stockton Public Schools. Rice taught for thirty years in the Alameda and Oakland public schools and, in 1929, he received his BFA degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts. That same year he published his book, Block Printing in the Schools.
Rice was a member of the Print Makers Society of California, the California Society of Etchers, the Prairie Printmakers, the Northwest Printmakers, and the San Francisco Art Association. He exhibited with the California Water Color Society, the Association of American Etchers, the Print Club of Philadelphia, and the Wichita Art Association. His work is represented in the collections of the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York; the Monterey Museum of Art, California; the New York Public Library, New York; the Oakland Museum of California; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
William Seltzer Rice died at his home in Oakland, California on 27 August 1963.
