Frances Upson Young (1870-1950) was a member of the Laguna Beach Art Association as well as the Ruskin Art Club and West Coast Arts. She studied with Paul Lauritz, Lorenzo Latimer and Anna Hills. She resided in Laguna Beach beginning in the early 1930's and remaining there the rest of her life. She enjoyed painting California landscapes from the North Coast southward to the Mojave Desert.

She was born and raised in Cleveland, beginning her art studies at the Cleveland School of Art and continuing abroad at Ainwick and Oxford in England. At age 22, she married Robert Young, an attorney who soon would be named the first city attorney for Hollywood, California, before the town was annexed into Los Angeles. The couple was blessed with two children, Mary Young Salazar and Clarence Upson Young. Clarence achieved some fame as a screenwriter for the motion picture industry.

In 1932, a typographical error merged the bios of Frances Upson Young and Florence Young. Art historian Maurine St. Gaudens discovered the error. Read more ...

Florence Young (1872-1974) lived to be 101 years old. Her training is impressive, having studied at the Art Institute in Chicago and at the Art Students League in New York. Among those she studied with are William Merritt Chase and the great Russian portraitist, Nicolai Fechin.

In 1920 when she was 48, she cared for her parents while living in Long Beach, CA. She then moved to Alhambra (near Pasadena) home to an artist colony centered on

Champion Place, often referred to locally as "Artist Alley," the wintertime home of Massachusetts artist Norman Rockwell. Full year residents of "Artist's Alley" included some of Florence's friends, Sam Hyde Harris and Clyde Forsythe. Florence's home was five blocks away on Granada Avenue.

Florence enjoyed landscape painting throughout California, including the

Monterey-Carmel area, Yosemite, the Eastern Sierra, the California desert, and even made a painting trek north to Alaska.

It was difficult for many women artists in Florence's day to get their work noticed. But Who's Who in American Art by Peter Falk compared Florence's work to some of California's most prestigious painters, Edgar Payne, William Wendt, Maurice Braun, Seldon Conner Gile, Percy Gray, the Wachtels, Hanson Puthuff and Sam Hyde Harris.

Una Gray 1873-1930* According to Maurine St. Gaudens, author of Emerging from the Shadows, A Survey of Women Artists Working in California, 1860-1960

there was an exceptionally skilled painter named Una Gray active in California as early as the 1890's. But, tragically, there is nothing known of her.

Suspicions are high that she is the same Una Gray, born and raised in Nova Scotia who eventually studied at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

There are reports of her exhibiting her work in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, but there isn't the slightest whisp of evidence that she ever painted in California, except for the exceptional landscapes of California and Oregon which bear her name.

Grace Allison Griffith 1885-1955 Grace Allison Griffith created pastoral scenes of Sonoma County, often of the area surrounding her home on Vine Hill Road, just north of Sebastopol. He father, Nathaniel Griffith is credited with having brought the Granvenstein Apple to Sebastopol.

A successful fruit rancher, Nathaniel Griffith was a good

friend of horticulturists Luther Burbank. Luther put Grace's talents to work as she often did some botanical sketches and paintings for Luther which he used for governmental documentation of his work.

Her painting talent was first recognized while she was a student at Cogswell Polytechnic High School in San Francisco. She later studied with Lorenzo Latimer.

In 1919, Grace and her sister Alice maintained a studio in Honolulu where Grace created a number graceful watercolors of early 20th century scenes of Oahu life.

In the 1920's, Grace visited and exhibited in Scotland and England. Her work was well received and she was invited to become a member of the Royal Watercolor Society. During Grace's lifetime, she often sold her paintings through Gumps in San Francisco and the Claremont Hotel in the Berkeley Hills. Today, her work is compared with some of the best of California's early watercolor artists, including the works Percy Gray.

In 1939, she married A. O. Harris of Berkeley, and lived there until her husband's death in 1950. Soon afterward, she moved back to the family farmstead in Sonoma County. She died there at the age of 70.

Anna Hills 1882-1930 Anna Hills was an exceptional impressionist, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cooper Union in New York. She helped establish the Laguna Beach Art Association and helped establish the Laguna Museum of Art.

After her studies in Chicago and New York, she moved to Paris for four years in 1908. There, she studied at the Julian Academy and painted throughout France, Holland and the South of England.

In 1912, she moved to Southern California, and a year later, settled in Laguna Beach. According to Ruth Westphal (author of Plein Air Painters of California), Anna Hills became "a prominent figure in the art history of Southern California."

She found time to to serve six terms as president of the Laguna Beach Art Association. She used this position to express her passion for the beauty of the Southern California landscape. Ever the teacher, Anna could often be seen leading a class of plein air painters along the cliffs of Laguna Beach She was active in the public schools, promoting arts education.

Her favored locales were in and around Laguna Beach, Mission Capistrano, the California Coast north to Carmel, and she often spent the winter months in nearby Banning and Hemet from where she enjoyed painting excursions into the California and Arizona deserts.

Tragically for the California Art World, Anna Hills died of a heart attack at the age of 48 (according to the Fleischer Museum website).

Thelma Speed Houston 1914-2000 Thelma did a painting a day for 50 years! The joy she found in painting and teaching matched her self discipline. Her recent retrospective exhibition in Vista, California was attended by hundreds of her former students, each with stories of how Thelma and her painting touched their lives.

This California painter was born in Brooklyn and studied at the Pratt Institute in New York. As a young painter, she was a member of the Nassau Art League and exhibited at the New York World's Fair in 1939. Professionally, she worked as a stylist for the St. Andrews Textile Company of New York and later as a designer for A Sulka Company

of New York and Paris. Her position allowed for extensively.

As a painter, she strived to capture the soul of the landscape, its intrigue and mystery. Her mix of colors, subject matter, and composition suggest a deep appreciation of the mystery of life and its many possibilities. Whether painting in Europe, Canada, Hawaii, or her adopted California, she felt blessed to “capture the color and excitement of a few moments in time.” She did this and more. Some of her paintings have a mythical dimension that point to deeper meanings and realities. They draw you in, and let you become a part of the landscape. Rather than fleeting moments in time and space, they are permanent expressions of an emotional landscape that speak to all. This is her legacy.

Orpha Klinker 1891-1964 Orpha was a Hollywood socialite, a portraitist, and also a California Desert Painter. She was included in Ed Ainsworth's famous book, Artists of the Desert. She once was given free run of Scotty's Castle in Death Valley when she was commissioned to paint a portrait of Death Valley Scotty.

Fascinated by history, she painted many of California's Adobes, hoping to inspire interest in preserving them or at least to capture images of them them before they all disappeared.

After one of her friends, Will Rogers was killed in an Alaskan plane crash, Orpha painted a portrait of Will Rogers and his pilot friend Wiley Post. With the help of another friend, Howard Hughes, the painting was exhibited at the New York World's Fair in 1939. Orpha thanked Howard for helping to have the painting at the Fair, and thanked him with a gift, an award winning print, Winter Touches the Desert #100.

This very print is available for sale, including this amazing handwritten thank you note from Orpha, July 13, 1939, written in her distinctive calligraphic printing style.