Grace H. Russell was born in Yreka, California in 1858, thirty miles north of Mt. Shasta. As a young girl, she moved to nearby Ashland, Oregon.
When Grace was 20 years old, she married James Fountain in 1878 in Ashland, Oregon. Four years later, she began painting and made art her life's work. Grace and James moved to Portland in the 1890's. Grace taught painting to small groups of women from her Portland studio.
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"Mount Shasta"
by Grace Fountain. 1934 72 x 84
Turtle Bay Exploration Park, Redding, California |
Grace Fountain participating
in a choir, Southern Oregon
Historical Society |
While in Portland, she illustrated Juaquin Miller's Sea of Silence which appeared in the 1904 issue of Sunset Magazine.
A year after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, she moved to Oakland at age 50, and remained there until 1942. During this period, she painted many natural locales, including the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, and Mt. Shasta.
Grace painted huge canvases of grand natural sites such as Crater Lake at, the Grand Canyon and Mt. Shasta. The Mt. Shasta painting (above) is amazing, an oil canvas measuring six feet high by seven feet wide.
Her painting Crater Lake was owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad and was exhibited at the National Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. In 1931, her Sunrise Grand Canyon was exhibited at the California Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
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At the turn of the 20th century, she and James moved to San Francisco. After the 1906 earthquake, the family moved to Oakland, California along with other San Francisco artists seeking more solid ground after the quake. They remained life-long friends of Joaquin Miller and lived on or near his property in the Oakland Hills. Grace Fountain continued painting well into her 70's and died in1942 in Oakland.
Her sister Mabel was also a landscape artist who remained in Ashland. The sisters remained close and visited often. Source: "Grace Russell Fountain: Her Life & Art, 1858-1942" By Gail Evans-Hatch publ. 2013."
Her paintings remain popular and are sought out. About forty of her paintings have been sold in recent years by one Portland auction house alone.
Sources: Sources: Siskiyou.edu, Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, 1998. Southern Oregon Historical Society.
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