For this painting, he used a plant often considered today to be a roadside weed known as wild mallow. According to the Roman naturalist and historian Pliny the Elder (23 - 79 AD), wild mallow was used as a mild laxative.

Antibes was painted in the South of France in the Spring of 1888. Here, Monet is attempting to express the effects of wind and wave while capturing the Mediterranean light. Monet later wrote, "What I bring back from here will be sweetness itself, white, pink and blue, all enveloped in this magical air."

Here, Renoir portrays Vollard as a true art connoisseur, admiring an Italian statue of a nude female kneeling. A more realistic image of Vollard would have shown his heavy stature, his bald head and bulbous nose.

Edgar Degas, 1834-1917 ... During his Parisian days, Edgar Degas was fascinated by the ballet. In Two Dancers on Stage, one is a flower and the other is a butterfly, part of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Degas pictures the scene as if the viewer is seated above in the left stage box. Such a painting would speak to the modern Parisian city life and its thriving art culture.

Woman at a Window seems to have been done by Degas quickly, as if in an afterthought. Its indistinct figure silhouetted by an open window, is bathed in reds and oranges in the late light of a setting sun. But such is not the case. The painting was planned and the model was hired. The painting was begun in 1871 when Paris was cut off from the outside world by the Prussian Army. There were major shortages of food. Degas paid the model with a hunk of meat, which she ate raw in front of him. Knowing this, perhaps the red and dark oranges suggest the dire nature of the times.

Paul Gauguin, 1848-1903 ... Gauguin left Arles, Provence in 1888 after his break up with fellow artist Vincent Van Gogh. Back in Paris, Gauguin soon was able to sell enough of his paintings, and in 1891 booked passage to Tahiti. He hoped to leave the French art with its know-nothing critics and his personal problems behind. Apart from a brief return to Paris, Gauguin remained in Polynesia in the South Pacific the rest of his life. In 1894, he returned to Paris to sell some of his Tahitian paintings at the Hotel Drouot in Paris. The sale turned out to be a flop! By 1895, he sold enough paintings and begged and borrowed enough from friends to return to Tahiti. After a troubled tenure in Tahiti, he relocated to Altuona on the Island of Hiva-Oa in the Marquesas Islands. He died in the Marquesas in May of 1903.

Nevermore was painted by Gauguin in Tahiti in 1897 after he had returned from Paris. Edgar Allen Poe's 1845 poem The Raven had grown to become world famous. It had been translated into French in 1875 and was certainly well known throughout the French speaking world. For Gauguin, the poet's sense of loss over the death of his lover spoke to Gauguin, and his disillusionment with the destruction of Tahitian culture by French authorities. Nevermore combines the beauty and eroticism of Tahitian culture with the unease caused by the intrusion and domination of colonialism.

Te Rerioa was also painted during Gauguin’s second stay in Tahiti. Gauguin meant the subject of this painting to be unclear. He wrote, "Everything is a dream in this canvas: is it the child? is it the mother? is it the horseman on the path? or even is it the dream of the painter!!!" He inscribed the Tahitian word for dream in the lower part of the composition but misspelled it "Te Rerioa:" it should read ‘rereioa’.

Georges Seurat 1859-1891... He was a Post- Impressionist known for chromoluminarism and pointillism. Chromoluminarism is the science of using dots of prime colors to interact optically to create a third color in the eye of the beholder. Pointillism is the use of small dots to form an image.

A Young Woman Powdering Herself is a fine example of pointillist technique. The model for this painting is Seurat's mistress, Madeleine Knoblock. She and Seurat had two sons together. The small dots of pure color were applied in varying concentrations and intensity, juxtaposed to dots of other colors. Together, they capture an image of considerable visual beauty.

Bridge of Courbevois shows, in the distance, the industrial Paris suburb of Courbevoie on the banks of the Seine. The foreground of this scene is the sloping bank of Grande Jatte Island in the Seine River. This is the locale of Seurat's most famous painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Again, Seurat shows his technical genius, using small dots of color to create images with light and shadow to marvelous effect.

Paul Cezanne 1839-1906 ... Cezanne painted Still Life with Cherub late in his career. It has a radical composition, competing perspectives almost heralding the coming of cubism.

The dirty and aged colored plaster cast figure stands on a table with fruit and onions in the artists studio with stretched canvases and partially done paintings. The different perspectives mix as do the themes, one showing the classical age of ancient sculpture along side the ordinary strewn items of his working studio. This would have delighted late 19th, early 20th century art buyers.

Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine is a scene near Cezanne's home in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France. Cezanne believed this scene embodied the ruggedness of the landscape of Provence and the equal ruggedness of its people. The branch of the Large Pine at the top of the painting follows the contours of the land, one of Cezanne's favorite framing devices. The mostly natural scene has some farm buildings in the distance and a modern railway viaduct in the distant right.

The Card Players is one of five card playing paintings done by Cezanne. One is in a private collection, purchased by the Royal Family of Qatar for between 2.5 and 3.0 million dollars. The remaining three are at the Musee d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia. Each painting shows two peasants playing cards.

Degas was influenced for The Card Players by a painting by the Brothers Le Nain (1599-1677) of the Realist School of Dutch Genre painting. The Le Nain Brothers' The Card Players was over 250 years old when Cezanne would have been seen it at the Musee Garet in Aix-en-Provence.

The times of Sam Hyde Harris were amazing, the ascendant days of California, the 1920's, '30's, 40's, '50's and beyond. California was the land of promise. People from all over the country and the world were attracted to the golden state for its beauty, diversity, and its unparalleled opportunity.

And California attracted wondrous artists. This exhibition is about one of them, Sam Hyde Harris 1889-1977.

"Main Line to the Pacific War" pictured above shows a determined and muscular railroad engine charging westward, laden with weaponry ordnance and soldiers to be loaded onto waiting Navy ships. The bayonetted rifle above shows the steel of American resolve.

By the time Sam Hyde Harris created this Southern Pacific WWII poster, he had been the go to guy for the Southern Pacific, the Union Pacific and the Santa Fe Railroads. They came to Sam for poster images meant to stimulate eastern eyes with wonder and the desire to move west.

In the early days, Sam's railroad posters caused Easterners to fantasize of whizzing past Western mountains, the Grand Canyon, or other bits of Americana as they headed to California.

Many followed through with that fantasy and as California's population expanded, it was Sam's job to get people to use the train to go from one part of the state to the other, or to take round trip excursions back east.

Sam's fine art painting began with artistic interest in Brentford, Middlesex, England. As a young teenager, his family emigrated to the U.S., settling in Los Angeles in 1904.

He attended art school classes at LA's Artists' Student League and the Cannon Art School under Hanson Puthuff. He worked in commercial art throughout his career, and still managed to teach art at the renowned Chouinard Art School.

To give you an idea of Sam Hyde Harris' status as a California painter, The Whittier News published a report in 1921 of a Laguna Beach Art Association exhibition including Anna Hills, Hanson Puthuff, Edgar Payne, Karl Yens, Guy Rose and Sam Hyde Harris.

His landscape paintings are well known for his stylized tall eucalyptus trees, his California harbor scenes, and later in his career, paintings of the California desert. Sam was drawn to the desert by his friend and fellow artist James Swinnerton. His painting style shows the influence of Hanson Puthuff. Sam's paintings are characteristically bathed in light and atmospheric effects. A favored locale for Sam's paintings was San Pedro Harbor, and he sought out scenes of Eucalyptus groves throughout the LA area and the San Gabriel Valley.

The setting for Sam Hyde Harris, Seeing the Unusual is Casa Romantica, a Cultural Center and Gardens high on the bluffs of the San Clemente Coast.

Ole Hanson, the founder of the City of San Clemente, had this beautiful Spanish Colonial Revival style home built in 1927. He only lived in it a short time. Ole and the rest of the nation suffered Black Friday in 1929 and entered the Great Depression. Ole had many real estate investments and mortgages and had to sell his properties to get out from under his indebtedness. Since Ole sold his home, the property passed through many hands until the late 1980's when a San Clemente group had a vision of what Casa Romantica could become.

Today the Casa is a cultural gathering place for multi-cultural events, recitals, art exhibitions and wedding celebrations. It is highly prized by the citizens of San Clemente.