Maury graduated from the Art Institute with an MFA. He received a Tyerson Foreign Travel Fellowship and Fulbright Grant, enabling him to travel and to paint in Paris and throughout Europe. In 1952, he began teaching art at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Four years later in 1956, he moved out of the East Bay to Sonoma County. He joined the art faculty at the Santa Rosa Junior College, a full-time position he held there for 35 years until his retirement in 1991.

In retirement, Maury continued to teach part-time another 21 years until 2012. His love of art remained the constant, vibrant core of his being, much as that day long ago in 1947 when he grabbed the lion's tail.

Over the years, Maury's love of the Santa Rosa community flowered. Ten years ago in April of 2013, hundreds of Santa Rosa locals crowded into Corricks on 4th Street for the reception of a Maury Lapp Exhibition and Sale. Maury was there to greet his adoring public including many of his former students. Early in 2014, Maury passed away at the age of 87.

Maury's art was well known beyond Santa Rosa. His work was featured in group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Denver Art Museum, SFMOMA, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Oakland Museum, San Francisco's Legion of Honor, and even as far away as Expo 1970 in Osaka, Japan.

Locally, Maury was at the center of Santa Rosa's art loving community. He was an annual participant in Art Trails, a juried group of local artists of Sonoma County who hold open studios each autumn.

Maury described his work as "eclectic." He painted what interested him. In Maury's artistic eye, a tall silhouette of big city skyscrapers resembled the tall spines of art books on his studio shelves. He painted both. He was sometimes motivated to paint still lifes, seaside scenes, or scenes with interesting architectural features. Regardless of his subjects, the resulting paintings were always interesting to view. His color sense and compositional eye created paintings which challenged and pleased his viewers.

Today, the Sonoma County artistic community lives on and thrives. Today, Art Trails and Art at the Source are county-wide programs of open artist studios held both in the Spring and Fall. Hundreds of visitors visit artist studios all over the county to view, critique and enjoy local art produced by local artists. Corrick's typically has a number of his paintings on view. The spirit of Maury Lapp lives on.

She was born in in the village of Dulwich, England, in 1889, just south of central London. As a 5 year old child, she moved with her family to South Africa, settling in Cape Town by 1894. There, her parents recognized and nurtured her artistic talents.

As a very young woman, she continued her artistic studies in Paris from 1902-1906. Although she arrived in Paris at the young age of 14, she soon was studying drawing with William Bouguereau at the Academie Julian. She said that the three great inspirations of her life were Renoir, Picasso, and Gauguin, but Renoir more than the others.

She returned to South Africa in 1915, now a refined twenty-six year old woman. She established a studio and married a New Zealander Hugh Couper Tennent in 1915.

After Madge and Hugh's wedding, the couple returned to Hugh's home in Invercargill, New Zealand, the southernmost point of the South Island.

It was wartime. Hugh, like most young able bodied young New Zealanders, headed off to Europe to fight. Madge lived the war years with her in-laws in Invercargill with Hugh fighting in France. Hugh was lucky - he survived! He returned from France to New Zealand with a severely injured arm. A great many of his Kiwi countrymen were not as fortunate.

After recovering, Hugh needed to find a way to make a living in peacetime. He sought out and received a position as Treasurer for British Samoa in 1917.

By this time, Madge was twenty-eight. She immersed herself in Samoan culture and began her lifelong artistic quest to express her love for the people of Polynesia.

In 1923 Madge was 34 years old. Having been in British Samoa for six years, Madge and Hugh decided to return to England so their sons could be educated in British schools.

En route, the family stopped over in Hawaii. Their intent was to stay only a few days, but they were enchanted with the Hawaiian Islands and its people. They decided to make Hawaii their home. Madge would remain in the Islands for the next fifty years merging her Parisian art training with her fascination and love of the Hawaiian people.

Madge began her Hawaiian artistic life by painting commissioned portraits of children. During this period, she received a gift from a friend, a book on the life paintings of Paul Gauguin, especially his Tahitian paintings. Since her days in Paris, she was most familiar with Paul Gauguin's work, but when she saw Gauguin's style applied with his love of the Tahitian people, she was hooked.

She began painting Hawaiian women, large paintings with images of graceful Hawaiian women portrayed with wild dazzling colorful swirls of heavy impasto. Like the Tahitian paintings by Gauguin, Madge's paintings not only embodied her training and technical skill, but her deep passion and love for the beauty of the Hawaiian people.

Later Madge quipped, "The Hawaiians are really to me the most beautiful people in the world, no doubt about it, the Hawaiian is a piece of living sculpture."

According to "Madge Tennent's Creed," published in the Isaacs Center's exhibition booklet, here are some some of the things Madge tried to achieve in her painting.

She wrote, "To make heavy forms lyric, to organize and paint big subjects as one would conduct a symphony, to build up color shapes in a three-dimensional painting much as one builds with bricks in a three-dimensional world, and to paint each picture in its most suitable rhythm ... used to give a sense of perpetual vibration or motion."

In 1935 when Madge was forty-six years old, Madge's work was receiving widespread approval. She was given a multi-city one-woman exhibition visiting Paris, London, Cairo, New York. The following year, a number of these paintings were exhibited in California. They were received warmly in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but were refused in Oakland.

The Oakland rejection was a blow, but Madge's spirits were given a boost by Diego Rivera. Rivera was incensed about Oakland's rejection and wrote to Madge personally, calling out the committee’s “stupidity,” adding, “Had I been on the jury refusing your pictures, I would have RENOUNCED at once!”

During the 1950's, Madge suffered several heart attacks. Consequently, she shifted from painting large canvases to small works on paper. By 1965, she stopped painting entirely. After a decade of declining health, she passed away at the age of eighty-two.

Today Madge Tennent is revered and loved as one of the most accomplished artists ever to have lived and worked in Hawaii. Outside Hawaii, Madge's works are in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). In Hawaii, her works may be viewed at the Bailey House Museum on Maui, the Hawaii State Art Museum, the Bishop Museum, Spalding House, The Honolulu Museum of Art on Oahu, and the Isaacs Art Center on the Big Island.

Every time Linda and I are on the Big Island, we visit the Isaacs Art Center in Kamuela, Hawaii. It is a small but precious museum and gallery, loaded with both top-notch historic and contemporary art. When on the Big Island, it is well worth your time to stop and view some of Madge Tennent's paintings in person. We look forward to our next visit.

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Museum of American Art

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