Evelyn Watherston (1880-1952)

Oil on canvas / board.
Titled: Yusuf
Measures 24×20 inches
Orientalist Art Collection Farhat Art Museum

Exhibited:
Paris Salon 1950
Royal institute of painters in watercolors London
Royal Society of portrait paintings England
Chase H. West Gallery London
Society of women artists
Farhat Art Museum

Geneve Rixford (1868-1957)

Titled: Three Graces
Measures: 20×16 inches
oil on canvas
Farhat Art Museum Collection

Geneve Rixford was born in 1868 in San Francisco, California. When she graduated from high school she began Saturday classes at the San Francisco Art Association in 1888, at the time when Emil Carlsen, the landscape painter, was its director. When Carlsen left the Art Association in 1889 to teach at the San Francisco Art Students League, Geneve followed him. She continued to study there for four months. In 1890 she traveled to Phoenix, Arizona, where she met her future husband Winthrop Webster Sargeant. She continued to travel with her parents and made friends with many prominent artists introduced to her through Emil Carlsen. She returned to San Francisco in 1891 where she opened a studio on Montgomery Street. She continued painting until her marriage to Mr. Sargeant in 1893. The couple lived in Chicago, Illinois, for four years before relocating to Monterey, California, in 1904. The Sargeants managed an orange ranch near Los Angeles in 1906 and Geneve was able to continue painting and raise her children there. When the ranch was sold they moved back to San Francisco where Geneve gave her first solo-exhibition of her California landscapes at the Sketch Club Rooms. She was one of the founding members of the Sketch Club and she became director of the San Francisco Art Association when it joined with the Sketch Club in 1915. In 1923 the family moved to Paris, France for five years. In Paris Geneve took composition from Andre LHote and her sons attended the Paris Conservatory of Music. She returned to San Francisco in 1927 after the death of her husband in Paris. She exhibited locally and won first prize in the San Francisco Art Associations Annual Exhibition in 1927. Geneve Sargeant was an active member of the San Francisco art community until her death in Santa Clara County in 1957.

David Bates (1840 – 1921)

In the valley of the Avon
12.20″ x 18.11″ (31cm x 46cm)
Created: 1903
Oil/Canvas Signed and Dated
Farhat Art Museum Collection.

David Bates was an English landscape artist who painted in oils and
watercolour. He was born in Cambridge, and from 1855 worked as a porcelain painter at the Royal Worcester porcelain works in Worcester – where he came to specialise in painting flowers. He left his employment there in 1880 to become a full-time professional painter. Bates was an “open-air” rural landscape artist, painting in the Midlands, Scotland and Wales, and abroad in Switzerland and Egypt. His work shows the influence of Benjamin Williams Leader, Joseph Thors and Samuel Henry Baker, and Bates is associated in style with the Birmingham School of artists. Bates exhibited many works at the Royal Academy, Grosvenor Gallery, Royal Society of British Artists and the New Watercolour Society in London, and at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. His works are currently on display in Liverpool museum, Worcester City Museum, and several other art galleries. His son, John Noel Bates (fl. 1870-1927), who adopted the professional name John Bates Noel, was also a notable landscape painter.

Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bates_%28artist%29

M. DeNeale Morgan

Titled: An Arab by the beach.
Measures 20×14 inches
Ghouache & watercolor on board
Farhat Art Museum Collection

M. DeNeale Morgan, as she signed her work, was one of Carmel’s distinguished plein air painters–a generous spirit who worked tirelessly for various Carmel civic groups. Her mother’s family emigrated from Scotland to the Monterey area in 1856, homesteading a ranch near Point Piños and then in the Salinas Valley. It was partly because of her family’s stories about the beauty of the Monterey Peninsula that DeNeale Morgan came here to live and work. Born in San Francisco in 1868, she was taken to Oakland in 1872, where the painter and teacher William Keith was her first teacher. She was precocious. In 1886 she enrolled in the California School of Design in San Francisco and studied with Emil Carlsen and Amédée Joullin until 1890. She paid her first visit to Carmel in 1903. In 1910 she returned to buy the studio and home of the late Sydney Yard, located next to what is now the Cypress Inn on Lincoln. From then on through the 1940’s, her studio was filled with tourists, buyers, other artists and friends. The building, ever expanding with new rooms and more paintings, became a meeting place for civic activists. Her style was her own, sometimes containing elements of the Barbizon School, sometimes tonalist or California impressionist, but always distinctly her own, usually in vivid color with broad, bold strokes, sometimes laid on with a palette knife. When pressed to say what school of painting she belonged to, she replied that she was a “horse and buggy artist.” She refused to be typed. Her favorite subject was the Monterey cypresses. When asked if she didn’t tire of that subject, she replied that she “would stick by her cypress trees till they sink into the sea, or–what is just as tragic and final–be hopelessly built-around.” In 1915, she won a Silver Medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco; in 1928 she was selected by Scribner’s Magazine as one of the nation’s foremost women artists. She rarely travelled outside Carmel, never outside the U.S., but had one-woman shows in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. A community activist, she was a member of the Save the Dunes Committee, which met in her studio to oppose a developer’s plan for a big tourist hotel at the foot of Ocean Avenue. Morgan, Fred Bechdolt and Talbert Josselyn were selected from the group of forty to approach Frank Devendorf about buying the property. “Devy” agreed to sell the 15 acres to the city for the grossly undervalued price of $15,000. The voters agreed to spend the money and the developer was stymied. DeNeale Morgan was also an original member of the Forest Theater, for which she designed sets. Wearing her distinctive purple cloak, she was active with the Carmel Arts and Crafts Club, the forerunner of the Carmel Art Association. During World War I, she was the director of the Carmel Summer School of Art, an offshoot of the Art and Crafts Club. It was she who invited William Merritt Chase, distinguished New York artist and teacher, to teach at the Summer School, greatly increasing Carmel’s reputation as an art center, both here and on the East Coast. She was a founding member of the Carmel Art Association and of All Saints’ Church, where she attended communion services every morning at 8 o’clock. During World War II, service men who were stranded in Carmel on Saturday nights could always find a bed in her studio and breakfast the next morning. Every Thursday afternoon she cut out portrait silhouettes–upwards of four hundred–for patients at the Fort Ord Hospital. She always painted on location so that she could capture the light, color and mood of her subject. DeNeale Morgan died on Oct. 10, 1948, at the age of 80. Four days before, she was at Point Lobos painting a cypress. After her death, the unfinished canvas was hung in her studio. Brother Cornelius, William Keith’s biographer, wrote in Morgan’s copy of his book: “To Miss DeNeale Morgan, master painter of the strange form, color and texture, the weather beaten toughness, the ancient fantastic weirdness, in a word, of the truth of our beloved Monterey cypresses …” Source: website: carmelresidents.org

Sarah E De Wolfe (1852-1935)

 

Lilacs
Oil on canvas
Measures 25×45 inches
Farhat Art Museum Collection

The artist Sarah E De Wolfe, was Born in Washington, DC on July 10, 1852. Sarah Bender settled in San Francisco in 1865. When the School of Design opened in 1874, she was one of the first pupils to enroll and was greatly influenced there by Virgil Williams. In 1904 she married Harold DeWolfe. (Curiously, some of her 1890s paintings are signed with her married name.) The earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed her studio at 509 Sacramento Street taking with it many of her early works. She later had a studio on Hyde Street and a home at 3400 Laguna Street where she died on June 15, 1935. Her oils of fruit and flowers qualify her as one of California’s finest still-life specialists. Member: SFAA; SF Women Artists. Exh: Mechanics’ Inst., 1883-97; Calif. State Fair, 1883, 1902; Calif. Midwinter Int’l Expo, 1894; SF Guild of Arts & Crafts, 1904; Sorosis Club, 1913. Collection: Oakland Museum. & CSL; AAA 1909; Ber; AAW; DR; SF Chronicle, 2-19-1904 & 1-3-1905 & 6-17-1935 (obit)

Reference by Eden Hughes.