James Everett Stuart 1852-1941 was 8 years old when he arrived in California in 1860. He studied in San Francisco with Thomas Hill and William Keith. His early works were filled with the mood and mystery of the French Barbizon School. He loved the wild areas of the west, painting north to Alaska, and he held a special fascination with Yellowstone. He was a Bohemian Club member. His paintings have hung on the walls of many of the club's prestigious members including at the White House.

Manuel Valencia 1856-1935. Manuel Valencia is descended from California's Spanish aristocracy. His grandfather was administrator of San Francisco's Presidio. He studied in Mexico and was a member of the Esquela de Bellas Artes de Mexico. In San Francisco, he studied with Jules Tavernier and painted often with artist friends Angel Espoy and Carl Jonnevold. He worked as a commercial artist and was art editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, a position paid for by art patron M. H. de Young. He sold one of his paintings of Yosemite to President William McKinley.

Gordon Coutts 1868-1937 was famous on four continents. He began his studies in Glasgow, Scotland and then attended the Academie Julian in Paris. There he met and married fellow artist Alice Gray, an Australian from Melbourne. He accompanied Alice back to Australia were he taught at the Art Society of New South Wales in Sydney. After achieving success down under, he and Alice exhibited at the Royal Academy in London and then moved to San Francisco where he was a member of the Bohemian Club. After the earthquake in '06, he moved to the Piedmont section of Oakland near fellow artist Xavier Martinez.

After Alice and Gordon divorced in 1918, Gordon visited North Africa, doing scenes and portraits of daily life in Tangiers. In 1925, he developed tuberculosis and moved to Palm Springs. He built his desert home in the motif of castles he knew in Tangiers, which today is a historic hotel named Korakia. When Coutts lived there, he was the toast of Palm Springs and hosted artist friends such as Nicolai Fechin, Grant Wood, Winston Churchill, and even silent era film star Rudolph Valentino.

Frances Upson Young 1870-1950. Frances Upson studied at the Cleveland School of Art and at Alnqick and near Oxford, England. In 1892, she married attorney Robert Young. They moved to Hollywood where Robert became Hollywood's City Attorney before the city was annexed to Los Angeles. She continued her art studies with Paul Lauritz, Lorenzo Latimer, Anna Hills and Beatrice Whittlesey. She was a member of the Laguna Beach Art Association.

Frances was caught up in a monumental mix up in the annals of art history. In recent years, details of her life and those of a similarly named artist named Florence Young were melded into one. The merging of the biographies of these two artists became an amalgam, a newly minted artist named Florence Upson Young whose works supposedly included the known paintings of both painters.

This historical anomaly was discovered and untangled by art historian and author Maurine St. Gaudens, and is addressed in her new four-volume book set Emerging from the Shadows, a thorough survey of Women Artists Working in California 1860-1960. Our Frances Upson Young painting The Edge of the Desert is featured in this book. Maurine St. Gaudens' Women Artists Working in California 1860-1960 and Frances' painting, The Edge of the Desert are now available for viewing as part of Jewels from our Collection.

In Boston, Arthur Merton Hazard 1872-1930 was a member of "The Boston School," a group including Edmund Tarbell and Joseph DeCamp. In Paris he studied with Henri Blanc. He is known for his portraits of Boston's society women. Due to failing health, he moved to the kinder climate of Los Angeles where he did portraits including silent movie stars Charles M. Russell and Douglas Fairbanks. He is also known for his California landscapes. His work is in the collections of The Red Cross Museum, Washington DC, the National Museum, Temple Israel Boston, and the Houses of Parliament in Ottowa, Canada.

Dedrick Stuber 1878-1954 came to California in 1920 and is known for his landscape paintings in California and Arizona, especially his stylized eucalyptus trees. He studied at the Art Students League in New York and was deeply influenced by Barbizon painters Camille Corot and Charles Francois Daubigny. In the light of California, his bright skies and forms of clouds are distinctively his. His work resides in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Pasadena Art Museum, The Fleischer Museum of Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Irvine Museum.  He was a member of the Laguna Beach Art Association, the Glendale Art Association, the Painters and Sculptors of Southern California.

Richard Dey DeRibcowsky 1880-1936 was born in Bulgaria in 1880 and studied in Paris, Florence and St. Petersburg. In 1904 at the young age of 24, he moved to Buenos Aires. There he founded the Academy of Beaux Arts in Buenos Aires. In 1920, he moved to the U.S., continuing his travels in America and Europe. Two of his paintings of Venice done in 1917 are in our gallery collection. While living in Los Angeles, he was in an automobile accident, leaving him wheelchair bound the rest of his life. He resided at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where his paintings were displayed on the walls and were offered for sale.

Conrad Buff 1886-1975 was born in Switzerland and studied in Munich. At age 19, he distanced himself from his demanding father, leaving Switzerland for America. He first worked on a Wisconsin dairy farm in an isolated rural Swiss-speaking region, but in two short years, made his way to Los Angeles where he quickly became associated with local artists.

At this time, Edgar Payne received a huge commission for murals for the Congress Hotel in Chicago. He hired young local artists to assist creating these murals and Buff was fortunate to join with Jack Wilkerson Smith, Peter Nielsen, and Grayson Sayer in completing Payne's vision. He married his wife Mary who later became a successful children's author, and Conrad illustrated her award-winning stories. After becoming an established painter in his own right, he became a close friend and painting partner of Maynard Dixon and he and Mary were close friends of a young Walt Disney artist, Joshua Meador and his wife Libby.

South African Paul Grimm 1891-1977 studied at the Dusseldorf Royal Academy before moving to Hollywood in 1919. After arriving in California, he painted backdrops for silent films before settling in Palm Springs. There, desert painters Edgar Payne and Jimmy Swinnerton were among his friends. He is well known for his desert scenes, paintings of the California Missions, and his portraits of Native Americans. His studio on North Canyon Road had a notable artist visitor, Dwight Eisenhower. Ike said, "I profited from the experience of seeing how a real artist creates the effects he wants."

Paul Lauritz 1889-1975 was born in Larvik, Norway. After brief art studies in Larvik, his family moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. From there, Paul made his way south to Portland and soon afterward established himself in Los Angeles. With hard work, he established a reputation for his portraits, landscapes and seascapes. He was a well beloved art teacher at both the Chouinard School of Art and the Otis Art Institute, with many of California's great painters among his students. He was a member of the Laguna Beach Art Association, the Royal Society of Art in England and the Salmagundi Club in New York. His work is displayed in many museums, including Sacramento's Crocker Museum, the Irvine Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Sam Hyde Harris 1889-1977 Sam's 6' 3" height, his affable personality and his unique artistic talents have gained him an honored place at the table of California artists.

At the age of 15, he came to LA from Middlesex, England, arriving in 1904. He studied painting with a long list of artists including Hanson Puthuff. In 1913, he visited Europe's museums. When he returned to LA, he married Phoebe Mulholland, niece of William Mulholland of the LA Water District. During the Great Depression, he taught art at the Chouinard Art Institute. After a divorce, he purchased a home owned by Jack Wilkinson Smith on Champion Place in Alhambra just south of Pasadena. The block became known as "Artist's Alley," and the "Montmartre of the Southwest." His neighbors included Frank Tenney Johnson, Eli Harvey, Clyde Forsythe. Every winter, Clyde Forsythe's old studiomate from New York, Norman Rockwell, would visit. Sam is well known for both his commercial work and his fine art paintings, especially his stylized eucalyptus trees. Late in his career, he painted many desert scenes and was a close friend of Jimmy Swinnerton.

John W. Hilton 1904-1983 studied with many of the greats, including Jimmy Swinnerton, Maynard Dixon, Clyde Forsythe and Nicolai Fechin. He was born in China, the son of missionary parents. As a young man in LA, he made jewelry for wealthy clients, including silent film stars. At this time, he made gem hunting excursions into the desert and was hooked. By the 1930's, he moved to Thermal, California, a small town between Palm Springs and the Salton Sea.

There, he opened a gem shop where he tried to sell his "self-taught" early paintings. One of his early customers was Jimmy Swinnerton. In short order, Jimmy and his artist friends Clyde Forsythe and Maynard Dixon were good friends. The gem shop's back room became John's private art school with an impressive faculty of great painters. In time and with lots of hard work, John developed into a fine painter. His articles and paintings were often published in Desert Magazine and Arizona Highways Magazine. He was a member of New York's Salmagundi Club. Later in his career, he studied with the great Russian portraitist Nicolai Fechin who often visited the Palm Springs area. He also was friends with fellow artist Dwight Eisenhower, an association which lead to one of John's paintings hanging in Ike's Oval Office.

Ralph Love 1907-1992 was a preacher who played the violin and painted. In the 1950's he opened his ART SHACK in Temecula, located in the high desert of eastern Orange County, California. While painting or teaching, if he had run out of inspiration for painting, he would lay down his brushes and pick up his violin and play a bit until the next wave of inspiration would arrive. He studied briefly with Sam Hyde Harris, but was, for the most part, self taught. He is especially well known for his desert paintings and his paintings of the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley. Senator Barry Goldwater, an avid art collector of desert paintings said, "Ralph Love is the finest living American artist I know, and I could look at his work all day long." His daughter is Lee Love Youngman of the Lee Youngman Gallery in Calistoga.

Joshua Meador 1911-1965 is best known as Walt Disney Studios Director of Animation Effects during the glory days of early Disney animation 1937-1965. But, although he truly loved his "day-job," Josh always thought of himself as an impressionist. He often mused, "Impressionism can be informed by modern art." His painting Cliff Shapes is an example, done with a technique employing nearly alternating perpendicular palette knife stokes of cliffs rising above beachcombers near his home north of Mendocino in Caspar.

Our gallery features the Meador Family Collection including some paintings once owned by Walt Disney. Our Joshua Meador webpage includes two films, one called 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree done for Disney's TV show in 1958, featuring Joshua Meador demonstrating his palette knife technique. The other is an effects reel of effects Joshua Meador created.

(PLEASE NOTE ... Most of our Meador collection is not currently at the gallery. If you wish to see particular Meador paintings, give us an advance request noting the time of your visit, and we will have the painting for available for viewing when you arrive.)

He decided to place a bronze statue of McKinley in the center of his adopted home town, Arcata, California, and he chose a promising young San Francisco sculptor to do the work.

Haig Patagian was thrilled by the commission, and by April of 1806, the bronze was finished. It was to be shipped on the 18th, but on that awful day, San Francisco shook. Haig believed his completed 8' statue was lost in the rubble, like most of the rest of his beloved San Francisco.

Later he learned his statue had fallen in the studio, but it had been cushioned by a plaster model. An alert workman from a nearby machine shop along with some willing passers-by moved the statue onto a wooden wagon and it was pulled into the street. At that point, the workers abandoned the site.

By the time Haig was able to visit the location, he found the ashes of the burned wagon, but his statue miraculously survived and lay amid the ashes in relatively fine shape. With some spit and polish, the bronze crated up and shipped off on a steamer to Eureka and was presented atop its pedestal in Arcata on the Fourth of July, 1906. Two thousand Arcatians attended the unveiling.

Over the last century to the present day, some citizens expressed and continue to express displeasure with the statue, but none of this criticism was based on the quality of Patigian's artistry. As a liberal college town in Humboldt County, California, some locals do not appreciate a statue in the center of their town, because some disapproved and continue to disapprove of McKinley's

late 19th century racist and imperialistic policies.

Patigian chose not to get caught up in this controversy. Like a good artist, a commission is a commission, and he busied himself with new challenges.

Haig was born in 1876 to parents who were teachers for the American Mission School in the Armenian city of Van, at the time, part of the Ottoman Empire. At age six, he told his mother he wanted to be a sculptor. Haig inherited an interest in the visual arts. His father, Avidis Patigian, was one of the first to experiment with the new art of photography. While taking photos of tall rocks which looked like a castle, he was observed by Turkish authorities and accused of selling the photos to the Russians.

Soon afterward, Avidis Patigian posed as a courier as he successfully fled to New York. Once in America, he made his way to Fresno to establish a new home for his family. After two years scrimping, borrowing and saving, he had enough to send for his family to make the hard and dangerous journey to California.

In San Francisco, young Haig Patagian became a wildly successful sculptor. He spent most of his career in San Francisco. He did spend a year of study in Paris, and on one occasion met Auguste Rodin. He showed the master photos of many of his works to which Rodin replied, "“Vous etes un sculpteur.” (Yes, sir, you are a sculptor.)

Like many notable San Franciscans, Patigian was an active member of the Bohemian Club and served as its president for two terms. In the 1920's he designed the Owl Shrine, a 40 ft high hollow concrete and steel structure located center stage at the Bohemian Grove site in Monte Rio, California, along the Russian River. The Owl Shrine is the centerpiece of the "Cremation of Care" ceremony held each year at the Bohemian Grove.

Haig was active in the San Francisco art community throughout his sixties. He was slowed by heart problems in 1949. On September 10, 1950, his wife Blanche died, and Haig died nine days later at the age of 74. He believed America could do much more to beautify their cities. Today he is honored fort the quality and grandeur of his work. Although photos and portraits seldom show Haig smiling, his brother recalled him as a loving person who enjoyed playing the banjo and cracking jokes.

SF's Legion of Honor,
Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia

First brought together by the Musee d'Orsay, this exhibition now visits San Francisco's Legion of Honor, the first exhibition of Pierre Bonnard's work to be shown on the West Coast in half a century. The exhibition features works from all of Bonnard's artistic periods, including his early "Nabis" masterpieces, plus some of his experimental photography and later interior scenes for which he is well known.

Early in his career, Bonnard was inspired by Paul Gauguin. He also was exposed to Japanese prints, eyeing them at an exhibition at the Paris School of Fine Arts in 1890. Along with friends from the Academie Julian, Maurice Denis, Edouarde Vuillard and Paul Serusier, he formed an aesthetic avant-garde movement known as "the Nabis," with symbolistic leanings.

After making several trips to Normandy, he bought a country house in Vernonnet in the Seine Valley which he called "Ma Roulotte" (My Caravan). The panoramas fired his imagination.

Since Giverny was close by, he often visited Claude Monet. Monet encouraged Bonnard to "break free from naturalism and develop his own poetic interpretations of nature.

In the early 1890's, Bonnard explored themes of intimacy, probably due to the influence of his friend Edouarde Villard. These are not extraordinary scenes, but show us sentimental scenes of intimacy or personal solitude.

Philadelphia , PA
The Philadelphia Museum of Art