This painting is both Art and History.

As art, Jules Tavernier's Dance in a Subterranean Roundhouse is a sensitive and detailed work, bringing a marvellous vision of the lives and customs of Northern California's Elem Pomo.

Similarly to other paintings of Native Americans by other California artists Albert Bierstadt, Grace Hudson, Nicolai Fechin and Maynard Dixon, Tavernier respectfully shows native people, their faces, personalities, their dress, their jewelry, their dwellings and their environs.

In Dance in a Subterranean Roundhouse, I counted over 80 figures. Each is distinct with respect to their posture, dress, and color. As Tavernier was witness to this dance, he was keenly observant. His respect and admiration for these people and their culture is obvious with each brushstroke.

As history, Travernier's painting shows some specific visitors at the dance who would, over time, become a major threat to the Pomo.

Shown observing the dance were a San Francisco banker and a Parisian investor with his military escort. They were owners and investors of the Sulphur Bank Quicksilver Mine, a major mercury mine located on the eastern end of Clear Lake in Mendocino County, less than a mile from the Elem Pomo's village on Rattlesnake Island. Today, the Sulphur Bank Quicksilver Mine is among the EPA's Superfund clean-up sites.

The visitors in the painting are San Francisco banker Tiburcio Parrott y Ochoa alongside Paris investor Baron Edmond de Rothschild and his traveling partner, French military officer Comte Gabriel Louis de Turenne d'Aynac.

In the short term, the mine proved exceptionally profitable, with the bankers and investors keeping all the immediate wealth, while leaving the long term consequences and expenses for the Elem Pomo and future generations.

Throughout history, the Pomos' story has been told countless times before. It is a tale of imperial dominance and colonization. It is the mass extinction of native cultures followed by waves of immigrants who extract and exploit natural resources. It was true of ancient cultures, the Greeks, the Romans, Columbus and the Spanish Conquistadores, and more recently, the English and Americans with their idea of manifest destiny.

The Sulphur Bank Quicksilver Mine quickly grew to become one of the largest mercury producing mines in the world. First it was mined for borax and then began mining sulphur in 1865. Occasionally, the open-pit mine ran across deposits of mercury. Mercury was mined by a string of owners from from 1873 to 1957, and this mine was an important producer of mercury in both world wars. The mine was closed in 1957. The EPA named the Sulphur Bank Quicksilver Mine to be an Superfund site in 1990.

In the process, the mine polluted the environment, poisoning the lake, its fish, the land and its plants and in turn, the Pomo people who ate fish from the lake and grew food on the land.

A rich part of Elem Pomo culture was basket weaving, a time-honored art central to the Elem Pomo way of life. This exhibition has examples of Pomo Basket art.

The materials for the baskets came from natural growing plants surrounding the Elem Pomo village. In processing the reeds, the Pomo, mostly women, would hold the reed in their mouths as they used their hands to strip bark and soften each reed. Many oral cancers resulted, a new horror which the Pomo had never experience before.

About the artist ... Jules Tavernier's story is a tragic tale, of an immensely gifted painter burdened with a whirlwind of self-destructive tendencies.

To give you an idea of Tavernier's life span (1844-1889) in the context of other French painters, he was four years younger than Claude Monet and nine years older than Vincent Van Gogh.

Tavernier lived his childhood in France and England. He began studying art at age 16 and exhibited at the Paris Salon at 20. At age 26, he was a soldier-artist, creating war drawings shipped by balloon to London for publication.

At age 28, he was hired by Harper's Weekly in New York to travel America's west drawing and painting as he went. He arrived in San Francisco in 1874.

As Tavernier's debts mounted, he needed to find an escape. In 1885, he fled San Francisco because his creditors were at his heels. He booked passage and set sail half an ocean away in the Island Kingdom of Hawaii. He remained in Hawaii the rest of his brief and tragic life. He died in Honolulu in 1889 of alcoholism.

While in Hawaii, he continued as he did in San Francisco, drinking with friends and painting. His Hawaiian work is best known for his volcano painting. He is known as the founder of the Volcano School, paintings done of Kilauea during its eruptions in the 1880's.

Ukiah's Grace Hudson Museum's current show fits well with the Jules Tavernier Exhibition at SF's de Young.

Grace Hudson was a talented late 19th century painter whose passion for Native American people was both sensitive and revealing. She counted many Pomo people among her closest friends. She resided in Hawaii around the turn of the 20th century, painting many portraits of Hawaiian people.

I knew I had seen this painting before. It was part of an outstanding exhibition four years ago at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento. That exhibition was so good, it is worthy of a second look.

Although E. Charlton Fortune (1885-1969) lived to the age of 84, her productive career as a California impressionist was brief. She ceased painting secular pictures at the age of 43, the pinnacle of her success when she was receiving critical acclaim for her work.

For reasons known best only to Effie, she chose to dedicate herself thereafter to religious art, creating art for use in Roman Catholic churches. In 1955, she received the papal award for her achievements in liturgical art, the Pro Ecclesia et Pontiface.

Her brief secular career as a California scene painter ended when she was only 43 years old.

The reason she signed her paintings with her first initial E. has often been explained because it was wise in Effie's day for a woman to disguise her gender in the male dominated art world. But the real reason she used her initial is she hated her first name, "Euphemia,"

Born with a cleft palate, she chose not to marry fearing she would pass on the gene. Effie steered clear of cameras too. Few photos of her exist. She never painted a self portrait, and she is not known to have sat for one either.

But between 1914 and 1928, she was very active in the art scene in both San Francisco and Monterey/Carmel.

The Pier, 1914 ... This painting was awarded a silver medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. It had been assumed lost, burned at a fire at St. Margaret's Convent in Edinburgh.


Summer, 1914 ... Art critic Anna Cora Winchell of the San Francisco Chronicle described this painting as a "poem in greens." Summer was exhibited in Gallery 117 at San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915.

Effie was born in Sausilito to a wealthy family. Her father, William Ranken Fortune, developed a lung disease, prompting the family's move to Los Angeles in 1890. After his death in 1894, a visiting Aunt took Effie back home with her to Scotland, enrolling her in St. Margaret's Convent in Edinburgh. Effie graduated St. Margaret's in 1904 and went on to study art in London at the St. John's Wood School of Art.

In 1905, Effie was now a grown young woman of 20. She returned to California, continuing her studies at the Mark Hopkins School of Art, then lead by Arthur Matthews. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed the Fortunes' San Francisco home, containing most of Effie's accumulated early paintings.

The Mark Hopkins School of Art was also destroyed, causing Effie to continue her art education elsewhere.

She went to New York, studying with Frank Vincent Dumond, where she learned the importance of expressing her own individuality and the importance of light effects. In time, she was elected women's vice president of the Art Students League and was making contributing illustrations to Harpers Magazine.

In 1910, she traveled to Scotland, England and France. In Edinburgh, she painted three panels of the Life of Christ for her Alma Mater, St. Margaret's Convent. The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh gave Effie her first solo exhibition in 1911 where she exhibited 27 paintings.

Summer Morning, St. Ives, 1923 ... This painting's complex composition filled with activity, boats coming into shore, fisherman hauling their craft, bystanders, all underneath a blizzard of seagulls, filling the sky with an abstract blur.

Effie is doing two things in this painting. Like a good impressionist, she captures the fleeting light. But another school of painters, Italian Futurists, were concerned with capturing motion. With regards to Summer Morning, St Ives, a critic at the time put it this way.

"Impressionism beating Futurism at its own game." Effie submitted the painting to the Societe des Artistes Francais Salon in 1924 where it was awarded a silver medal. The certificate was in the name of "Monsieur Fortune Charlton."

In preparing for Summer Morning, Effie painted a number of smaller paintings, including Mackeral Season (above) and Scavengers (below.)

Scavengers, St. Ives, 1922
Collection of Marie and Murray Demo

After her European trip, she returned to San Francisco where she became an illustrator for Sunset Magazine. During the next ten years, Effie and her mother spent their summers in Monterey where Effie painted local coastal scenes and studied with other resident and visiting artist friends such as Armin Hansen, William Ritschel and William Merritt Chase.

Effie was active in the Carmel art scene, teaching private lessons and organizing outdoor painting workshops. She was given solo art shows at San Francisco's Schussler Galleries in 1914 and the Helgesen Galleries in 1918. She exhibited works at both the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the Panama-California Exposition, receiving silver medals at both events.

Summer Night, 1920 features the yet to be completed D. L. James House located in Carmel Highlands, just a few miles south of Carmel. The house's rustic appearance is meant to blend with the rock outcropping on which it sits. Fortune captures this scene in the glow of moonlight, with long skirted women in the foreground evoking an earlier era.

In 1921, Effie and her mother moved to England, settling in the small coastal town of St. Ives, Cornwall, where they lived in 1922 and 1923. From there, they visited Scotland and St. Tropez in France. In 1922, she was elected a member of the Society of Scottish Artists and in 1924, one of her paintings of St. Ives Harbor received a Silver Medal at the Paris Salon.

In 1927, she returned to Monterey and joined the newly formed Carmel Art Association.

One year later, she dedicated her life to liturgical art for Roman Catholic Churches. She ceased participating in secular painting.

Picking Apples (Above the Town), c1920 ... The woman with auburn hair is thought to be Effie's best friend, Ethel McAllister.

To Effie, the apple trees' connection with the Biblical account of the tree of knowledge is unmistakable. But like Mary Cassat's treatment of the same subject, Effie pictures these apple-picking women in a positive light, reaching out for knowledge.

Feeding Chickens, 1918 ... Realists, Barbizon painters and Impressionists all created scenes of farm workers. Effie revisits this theme in Feeding Chickens. This composition is striking with the vertical picket fence setting a rhythm across the canvas balanced by the slant of shadows.

The Senora's Garden, c1916-17 ... This is the home of Maria Ignacia Bonifacio, also known as the Sherman Rose Adobe. Bonifacio died a few months before Effie did this painting, part of a tribute.

El Rancho Del Carmelo (The Hatton Ranch), 1920 ... This dairy farm with its sun drenched white buildings and glowing haystacks is a pleasure to behold. It was exhibited at the Carmel Club of Arts and Crafts in the summer of 1920. Voted Best in Show, viewers appreciated its local subject and its "virile" uncompromising approach.

Linda's new Etsy shop: Linda Sorensen has opened a brand new shop on etsy.com, focusing so far on giftable small original paintings, and on a few giclee prints on canvas of some of her favorite larger paintings. The two pictured here are among her 6" by 6" "mini"s, framed as shown on the site. Etsy's platform provides an easy-purchase, fast-shipping option as an alternative to contacting Linda or our fine art gallery (which are of course equally welcome).
Link: http://www.etsy.com/shop/lindasorensenpaints

Bentonville, AR
Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art

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