Artists and Authors associated with Lake Chapala, Mexico
Tony Burton
Tony Burton's books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran"), "Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).
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Marion Delamater Freeman (later Marion D Freeman Wakeman) was born in Montclair, New Jersey, on 5 December 1891 and died in Northampton, Massachusetts, on 22 September 1954 (not 1953 as stated in most online sources).
Freeman graduated from Smith College, Northampton, in 1914 and then joined the Art Students League, where she studied with George Luks and Frank Vincent DuMond. She was also taught by Charles Webster Hawthorne and Dwight William Tryon. Though she did produce a limited number of etchings and sculptures, she is primarily known for her finely executed watercolors.
She married Dr. Seth Wakeman, professor of education and child safety at Smith College, in 1926. The couple had one son, Seth Freeman Wakeman.
Marion Freeman Wakeman. 1948. Church at Chapala.
This painting Church at Chapala, dated 1948, was presented to the Smith College Art Museum in her memory. When it came up for auction in 2022, the artist’s surname was mistakenly given as “Wakefield.” No further details are known of her time in Mexico, though she may have been a participant in a summer art school arranged by Irma Jonas, held in Ajijic.
Marion Wakeman exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design, the Architectural League, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the National Association of Women Artists. Her water colors were shown at the Montclair Art Museum and at the Smith College Art Museum.
In 1936, Wakeman was one of only 12 artists who had works purchased at the 45th Annual Exhibition of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in New York City.
The following year, her painting titled Spring Plowing; Mexico, was bought by Seward Prosser of New York and given to Mrs. Dwight W. Morrow when she attended a meeting of the trustees of Smith College. (Dwight W Morrow was a businessman, diplomat and politician, who was US Ambassador to Mexico, 1927-29 during the Cristeros period; among other achievements, he bankrolled the Diego Rivera murals in the Palace of Cortés, Cuernavaca.)
Wakeman’s watercolors exhibited at the Smith College Art Museum in July 1938 included “a number of interesting plant studies and designs.” At the time, the museum was also exhibiting a Picasso.
In 1942, Wakeman won the Edith Penman Memorial Prize at the 50th Annual Exhibition of the National Association of Women Artists for a painting titled The Vain Old Cat.
Marion Freeman Wakeman. Illustration, The Curious Lobster.
She also illustrated the charming and fun children’s book The Curious Lobster, written by Richard W. Hatch, first published in 1944. Described quite aptly as “An American Wind in the Willows,” it tells the stories and escapades of Mr Lobster and his diverse group of friends.
Wakeman’s work is represented in the permanent collection of the Martha’s Vineyard Art Association’s Old Sculpin Gallery, alongside works by Hans Hoffman, Vaclav Vytlacil, Ruth Appledorn Mead, Julius Delbos, Frank C. Wright, Renée George O’Sullivan (who lived in Ajijic in the 1940s) and Louisa Gould.
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Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Hilda Marie Osterhout was born in Brooklyn, New York in about 1925 and died in 2016. She grew up in a well-to-do family and, after attending Packer Collegiate Institute, was “presented to society” at the “Allied Flag Ball and Victory Cotillion in New York.” She then studied at Vassar College, where she won the Dodd Mead Intercollegiate Literary Fellowship for the best draft of a novel submitted by a college student in 1946, the year she graduated.
Her novel, provisionally titled Field of Old Blood (a Lorca quotation) was set in Mexico, and the award (an advance of $1500 against future royalties) enabled Osterhout to spend eighteen months in Mexico, divided between Mexico City and Ajijic, to complete the novel in 1946-47.
The book, finally titled The Flame and the Serpent, was published in 1948 by Dodd, Mead and Company, with a European edition published by Gollancz in London the following year.
Speaking to the Manor Club of Pelham shortly after her book was published, Osterhout recalled how she lived in Mexico City “under the strict chaperonage peculiar to the young girls of the country”, whereas, “In Ajijic I rented an adobe hut for $20 a month and paid two maids one dollar a week to look after me, and I learned the quiet feeling of danger that can surround you living in an Indian village where witch doctors still practice.” According to Osterhout, she had seen witchcraft “practiced on foreigners whom the Indians did not like, to the point where the foreigners left the village and never returned.” She also claimed that, “these Indian traditions are still carried on because they are taught in the Indian schools in connection with the ancient Aztec myths.”
Osterhout concluded that the main differences between the US and Mexico lay in the categories of history (where the US looked forward, and Mexico took inspiration from its history), art (where the art of Diego Rivera and others glorified the Indians), religion (a strong uniting factor in Mexico) and the position of women:
The women in Mexico are governed by tradition, yet they are utterly respected and adored becasue of the sole fact that they are women. Perhaps we have gained a lot when we gained our equal rights with men, but after seeing the way women are treated in Mexico I am beginning to think that we lost as well as gained.”
Osterhout is reported to have studied at the University of North Carolina and at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), though details of her time spent at either institution are lacking.
Osterhout. Photo by Soichi Sunami.
The Flame and the Serpent had a mixed reception. According to Marc Brandel, writing in the New York Times, the book was “a remarkable rather than an admirable novel.” Despite its “faults of style and construction” “there shines through it, even at the its worst and most pretentious, one of those vivid talents that it is impossible to ignore.” The story is about a young girl’s first trip to Mexico, and her experiences of cultural differences she encounters, including those related to life, love and marriage. Brandel thought that the merits of the novel lay in “the sensitive beautifully written descriptions of certain facets of Mexican life as seen through the eyes of an American girl.”
Charles Poole, another reviewer in the same newspaper, described it as “One of the most unusual books about Mexico… since D. H. Lawrence grappled and groaned through that magnificent country’s mysteries.” He considered the writing to be “fresh and untarnished” though the author’s “interest in life still outruns her mastery of the novel’s form.”
Osterhout, who also wrote several book reviews for the New York Times. renewed the copyright of The Flame and the Serpent, her only novel, in 1976.
In 1950, Osterhout married Brinton Coxe Young, son of prominent impressionist artist Charles Morris Young. Hilda and her husband lost many of their family heirlooms in 1989 when burglars stole 19 paintings by Charles Morris Young and twenty works by other artists, as well as a small fortune in rare china, jewelry and many other items. The total haul, conservatively estimated at over $500,000, included a gold sealing ring that had belonged to Arthur Middleton, a maternal ancestor of Brinton Young and signatory of the US Declaration of Independence. This was not the first tragedy to befall the family. Charles Morris Young had lost almost 300 of his paintings in a house fire shortly before he died in 1964.
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Hilda Marie Osterhout. 1948. The Flame and the Serpent. Dodd, Mead and Company (and Gollancz, London, 1949).
New York Times, 24 October 1948; 11 November 1948; 8 May 1949; 25 June 1950; 17 June 1951.
The Standard-Star, 2 Feb 1949, 18.
AP News. 1989. “Children of Pennsylvania Impressionist Lose Family Treasures,” AP News, 20 October 1989.
Vassar Chronicle, Volume III, Number 34, 8 June 1946, 1.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
This beautiful architectural sketch for a major railroad and hotel complex in Chapala offers intriguing insights into plans at the start of the twentieth century to transform Chapala into an international tourist destination.
The drawing is dated 1912. This is despite the fact that the company that eventually built the La Capilla-Chapala railroad was not formed until five years later. Construction of the railroad and station began in 1917, and was completed by 1920; the inaugural passenger service was on 8 April 1920.
Arne Dehli. 1912. Sketch of Hotel Plaza, Chapala.
The person who commissioned the drawing, and was the main promoter of the company that built the railroad, was Norwegian-born entrepreneur Christian Schejtnan. The author of the sketch was Norwegian-American architect Arne Dehli (1857-1942). Dehli, born in Ringsaker, Norway, trained in Germany before moving to New York to design churches, the nurses’ home for the Norwegian Hospital, various business structures, some private residences, and the zoological building in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. The Norwegian link presumably explains why Schejtnan wanted Dehli to be involved in the project.
We can also safely assume that Schejtnan made good use of the drawing in his pitches to potential Norwegian investors. His sales pitches extolled the virtues of the railroad and how building a first class hotel would turn Chapala into Mexico’s largest tourist and health resort. Additional revenues would come from building private villas, a combined yacht and automotive club, and a casino. In short, Schejtnan’s master plan would create “an El Dorado for the country’s richest, a sought-after place for the country’s jeunesse dorée.” (Brøgger) Norwegians were sufficiently entranced with Schjetnan’s dreams for this remote lake on the other side of the world that they happily parted with tens of thousands of dollars. Sadly, most investors reportedly lost their shirts long before the railroad ever came into being.
The master plan was far too ambitious to achieve all at once, and, in any case, Schejtnan was always short of investors and working capital. For the railroad line itself- his top priority- Schejtnan imported a young Norwegian railroad engineer, Birger Winsnes, to oversee the work of laying the track; Winsnes worked in partnership with Guadalajara engineer Juan José Barragán, the brother of famed modernist architect Luis Barragán.
It is possible that Schejtnan always hoped to have Dehli design the railroad station, his second priority. But, with funds tight, he finally settled on asking a near neighbor in Chapala—engineer Guillermo de Alba—to draw up the plans for the station.
Dehli remained in the picture, though. And four months after the railroad opened, Guadalajara press reported that he had been chosen by Schejtnan to design the luxury Hotel Plaza, intended to be the centerpiece of an extensive residential development.
Sadly, Schejnan’s and Dehli’s plans for the Hotel Plaza never progressed beyond the drawing board. A copy of Dehli’s plan is in Mexico’s National Water History Archive (Archivo Histórico del Agua) in Mexico City.
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Magnus Bjørndal. 1931. “Arne Dehli,” in Norwegian-American Technical Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 12 (April, 1931).
El Informador: 11 August 1920.
Brøgger, Kr. Fr. 1932. Gullfeber ‑ en advokats optegnelser fra siste jobbetid. (Gold Fever – A Lawyer’s Records from the last job.). Forlagt av H. Aschehoug & Co (W. Nygaard), 63-64. [translation by author]
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Frederic Jennings Haskin was born 1873 in Shelbina, Missouri. With only the most rudimentary formal education, his first job, at the age of ten, was as housekeeper for a weekly publication called Torchlight. Many years later, Haskin became its publisher, and a correspondent with papers such as the St. Louis Globe Democrat and the Kansas City Star. In the course of his career, Haskin traveled very widely, reporting on the sights and sounds of places as diverse as the Yukon and Japan, though it is unknown whether or not he ever saw Lake Chapala with his own eyes.
Haskin wrote several books, including The American Government (1912); The Immigrant: an Asset and a Liability (1913); The Panama Canal (1913); 5000 New Answers To Questions (1933); and The American Government Today (1935). But he was best known for an information column that appeared in The Star and more than 100 other newspapers, where, aided by a team of researchers, he answered readers’ questions, more than 25 million in total according to some estimates.
So, how did Haskin describe Lake Chapala? In 1916 he wrote that it was:
a shallow and uncertain body of water, given to sudden bursts of wrath without warning, rising suddenly in storm under the whip of a squall, and making life miserable for the Mexican fishermen in their little open boats.
They are poor sailors, anyway, and their methods would awaken the contempt of a Gloucesterman, but they continue to fish in spite of the danger, contenting themselves with a preliminary prayer in their little village church, and in burning a candle for the souls of those whom the squalls have overtaken.
All round about Chapala lies what was one of the rich districts of Mexico under the old regime.”
Then, after a brief discussion of how the hacienda system meant that most of the land was controlled by only a small number of people, Haskin commented on the impact of the Revolution:
Much of that old-time life had been swept away in the storms of revolution. The shores of Chapala are changing, passing through a time of stress that may lead to better things than the picturesque feudalism of yesterday. But the restless lake that saw the coming of the Aztecs and the Mayas, that watched the Spaniards take the land and is watching them lose it back to the Indians is ever the same. Under the moon it whispers its old secret to the pebbled beaches.”
Haskin, a charter member of the US National Press Club and its third president in 1912, died at his home in Washington, DC on 24 April 1944.
Sources
Frederic J Haskin. 1916. Buffalo Evening News, 27 Nov 1916.
National Press Club Archives. Finding Aid for the Frederic J. Haskin Collection (1911-1969).
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Ajijic’s sister city connection to Studio City in California had already been going five years by the time journalist Bill Reed wrote about it in 1967. The sister city program was part of the People to People initiative begun a decade earlier by former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In 1964 the executive board of People to People held a lunch meeting at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala, a meeting attended by Eisenhower’s son (John D. Eisenhower), Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos, former president Miguel Alemán, the Jalisco state governor Juan Gil Preciado, and other guests who listened to a keynote address by Walt Disney (in which he claimed “Jalisco” was his favorite song).
According to the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News (in January 1963), the idea to twin Ajijic and Studio City came from Eric Lindhe, a retired US Army colonel who had lived seven years in Ajijic and suggested the idea to Jim Hawthorne, Studio City’s honorary mayor. Lindhe undertook to liaise with villagers and help organize a formal sister city relationship. The press report also mentioned that a more recent Ajijic resident, retired civil engineer Don Savage, “has been working on a project to get water into the town’s homes for the first time.”
Press Telegram, 1962
The first tangible impact of the sister city connection was in September 1962 when a Studio City resident, the uncle of Ann Mosher, visited Ajijic and presented donated poster paints to the children taking art classes in Neill James’ library. That program grew into the Children’s Art Program, now held under the auspices of the Lake Chapala Society.
Mosher explained to fellow donors that the children made cards which tourists bought for a peso each, with part of the proceeds going direct to the aspiring young artists.
The Chamber of Commerce in Studio City had initially wanted to send medicines and children’s clothing to Ajijic, before learning that customs regulations might be an issue, so they sent large bottles of poster paint instead.
Despite knowing the potential problems, in October the Kiwanis Club in Studio City organized a major clothing drive for Ajijic children and collected close to a ton of clothes and shoes! Simultaneously, the Studio City Chamber of Commerce (SCCC) announced a 10-day tour to Mexico, to include Ajijic, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Taxco and Acapulco.
In November 1962 the Studio City Merchants Association joined with SSCC to host a Mexican Fiesta to raise funds, and at the end of month, thirteen Studio City residents left Los Angeles for Mexico. According to press reports, Mexicana airline assisted with the transportation of the donated clothing.
All thirteen visitors were overwhelmed by the “extraordinary cordiality of their hosts south of the border.” The group traveled to Ajijic from the airport in a “special bar-equipped bus.” Some sixty charros in multicolored serapes met the bus on the outskirts of Ajijic to escort the Studio City group to the plaza, where an estimated 4000 villagers gathered to cheer and welcome the group with music, folkloric dancing, church bells and confetti. “Torchlights blazed on all sides (there are no street lights in Ajijic).” This was the start of a three-day whirl of receptions, visits, parties and dancing. The visitors encountered no anti-US sentiments in the village, which “may be partly because the Americans residing in Ajijic have taken a special, helpful interest in the town and its problems.”
The following March the Los Angeles Times reported that plans were underway for a return visit by a group of Ajijic villagers to Studio City in April (via bus to Tijuana), and that Studio City residents had started to fund raise for a “long-needed” school in Ajijic, which “could be built for as little as $1,500.” This visit was subsequently postponed more than once, in part because a school teacher from Ajijic was acting as the group’s interpreter, so it needed to take place during a school holiday.
In April it emerged that the six large boxes of clothing that had been held at Guadalajara airport since the previous December had finally been granted duty-free status and had been released, following the personal intervention of the President, to Col. Eric Lindhe for onward transport to Ajijic.
Los Angeles Times, 23 July 1963.
Fund raising continued apace in Studio City, including a Bowling Tourney for the “rehabilitation of a boys’ school” in Ajijic, and the auction of a Tink Strother oil painting of an Ajijic woman preparing tortillas. Strother had lived in Ajijic the previous year.
In July an “advance party,” comprised of Ajijic residents Don Savage and his wife, and their 22-year-old maid, Mariana Yañez (the niece of Ajijic mayor José Serna Flores), arrived in Studio City. Savage persuaded Studio City officials that any funds raised by SCCC to affray the expenses of a visit by Ajijic children could be far better utilized to help pay for the expansion of Saúl Rodilas Pina boys’ school in the village. The school, for grades 1 to 6, was attended by 400 boys at the time, and needed to expand but had run out of money. Villagers wanted to buy bricks and steel beams to add two classrooms and a kitchen. Savage pointed out to his SCCC hosts that the expense of obtaining passports and visas for Ajijic students would be considerable. The SCCC sent a check for $650.00 to Ajijic for the school and continued to fund raise. Eric Lindhe gave a talk in Studio City in December and raised a further $105.00 to outfit junior soccer teams in Ajijic.
In March 1964 the SCCC voted to provide $300.00 to bring two boys, two girls and two teachers from Ajijic to visit Studio City. At the end of the academic year, the Ajijic students finally arrived.
The four students named in newspaper reports were Rafael Chávez (13 years old), “Frederico” (Federico) López (11), María del Rosario Díaz (14) and María Guadalupe Reyes (13). They were chaperoned by teacher Martha Zuñiga (20) and school principal Velia Hugo. Born in Toledo, Ohio, Hugo had moved to Ajijic with her family as a 10-year-old and spoke perfect English. Also accompanying the group was delegado José Ramos Pérez and the village padre, Ramón Barba. Their Studio City hosts financed an itinerary that included visits to Disneyland, a beauty salon, shopping for clothes, a baseball game at Dodger’s Stadium, Revue Studio, boating and the naval air station at Long Beach. In their honor, Los Angeles mayor, Sam Yorty, officially proclaimed the week of July 9-16 “Ajijic Week in Studio City.”
Two years later a second group from Studio City, about 20-strong, stayed in Ajijic for several days at the end of November 1966. They toured the village boys’ and girls’ schools, and the new vocational school to which SCCC had contributed funds. By then, SCCC had plans to raise at least $1,000 to launch a food program of breakfasts for 200 needy Mexican youngsters in Ajijic. Blaine Hodgson, a retired US army officer living in Ajijic, had offered to oversee the program.
Velia Hugo kept in close contact with Studio City and the local newspaper reported in January 1968 that she was raising funds for a basketball court and that members of the SCCC also hoped to build a clinic in Ajijic, and start a kindergarten. A letter exchange was organized between students in Studio City and Ajijic, and in May the SCCC was planning to expand the small library in Ajijic and was considering establishing a retail outlet in Studio City to sell wares from Ajijic.
The SCCC also helped sponsor a 13-year-old Ajijic artist, Ramón Navarro, to leave Ajijic and live with an aunt in Los Angeles to take formal art classes. According to press reports, Navarro was, in August 1968, “exhibiting his oil paintings and watercolors at an art show in Guadalajara” and his talent had been discovered by Irma McCall, a former resident of Ajijic residing in Long Beach. (McCall’s article, “Ajijic–Paradise Under the Mexican Sun,” was published in the 11 March 1962 issue of the Independent Press-Telegram.) Studio City support for Navarro continued for several years. In 1973 the Women’s Division of SCCC gave him a scholarship to complete his education in the US.
The SCCC announced plans to invite Navarro and several residents of Ajijic to a block party in September. The Ajijic group was comprised of four adults—J. Trinidad Ramos Jr, president of the Ajijic Chamber of Commerce; businessman Rufino Palacios; Velia Hugo and Esperanza Briones, both teachers at the Girls’ School; and four 6th grader students: Rosemaría Jiménez (13), Antelma Plasencia (12), Rubén Romero (12) and Arnulfo Beas (13).
Velia Hugo addressed teachers at a luncheon at Riverside Drive Elementary school, telling them that, in Ajijic: “The number of children in our classes varies with about 100 children in first grade, 62 in fourth grade and 32 in sixth grade…. These children have only one teacher in each class.” She also explained that, with DIF support, hot breakfasts were being provided to about 500 village children.
J. Trinidad Ramos told the local press that after 6th grade in Ajijic, boys received “manual training” and girls studied sewing and dressmaking. He estimated that there were “more than 300 American families” living in the village, and stated that the resident Americans, spearheaded by Mr and Mrs Booth Waterbury of the Posada Ajijic, were interested in starting a medical center.
Studio City helped another young Ajijic artist in 1970 when the SCCC sponsored 24-year-old “Juan Olverez” (= Juan Olivarez) to study art for a month in Studio City. American artist Jack Rutherford, who had been living in Ajijic for several years and recognized the young man’s talent, had contacted the SCCC, which arranged for Olivarez to become the house-guest of Mr and Mrs Robert Hecker for the summer, while Mr and Mrs Rutherford and their four children enjoyed a working holiday in Laguna Beach.
Note: Juan Olivarez was born in 1944 and would have been 26 in July 1970. Sadly he died in 2022 before I was able to ask him about his memories of Studio City and about his later artistic career, which centered on photography, as detailed in this profile.
As Ajijic grew, so contacts with—and financial support from—Studio City became more sporadic, though they continued until at least the mid-1980s. In 1971, for example educator Margaret Hyatt spent several days in Ajijic and returned later that year to give a month-long literacy tutor-training and demonstration course to young adults in Ajijic. A group of Studio City residents visited Ajijic in November 1973, to begin arrangements for a return trip for a 30-member delegation from Ajijic, including a youth soccer team, the following year. In 1976, SCCC organized the donation of medical equipment for Ajijic’s first public health clinic, which opened in May 1977. The SCCC also raised funds in 1977 for “school and church supplies” in Ajijic, and were still supporting a Scholarship Fund for Ajijic as late as 1984.
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Other Lakeside communities with sister cities include:
Chapala-Lake Arrowhead, California (included on official 1972 list of all sister cities)
Jocotepec-Watsonville, California (begun 15 September 2018)
Chapala-Jin Xi, China (the highway through La Floresta was renamed Boulevard Jin Xi in 1994)
Chapala-Barrhead, Alberta, Canada (from about 2007).
Chapala-Pico Rivera, California (from June 2024)
Sources
Guadalajara Reporter: 16 July 1964, 8.
Los Angeles Evening Citizen News: 19 Jan 1963, 4; 5 Dec 1963, 7; 3 Jul 1964, 6; 3 Jul 1964, 6; 13 Jul 1964, 6.
Los Angeles Times: 7 Mar 1963, 138; 7 Apr 1963, 234; 15 Apr 1963, 2; 23 Jun 1963, 201; 4 Jul 1963, 107; 9 Jul 1963, 73; 27 Aug 1963, 2; 9 Jun 1964, 94; 31 Jul 1980, 209 12 Jul 1984, 211.
Press-Telegram, 30 Sep 1962, 109.
South Pasadena Journal: 03 Nov 1971, 10.
Valley News: 07 Feb 1967, 99; 05 Jan 1967, 49; 29 Dec 1967, 15; 04 Aug 1968, 50; 20 Sep 1968, 35; 22 Sep 1968, 12; 04 Feb 1971, 90; 16 Nov 1973, 43; 08 Oct 1974, 25; 02 Sep 1976, 42; 31 Mar 1977, 35; 01 Nov 1977, 32.
Valley Times, 2 Oct 1962, 15; 25 Oct 1962,17; 19 Nov 1962, 15; 27 Nov 1962, 2; 10 Jul 1964, 2; 25 Sep 1968, 8.
Van Nuys News: 21 Jan 1968, 6; 09 May 1968, 49; 26 Jun 1970, 17; 30 Jun 1970, 13; 17 May 1973, 105; 07 Aug 1973, 12.
Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet: 04 Jan 1966, 10; 04 Oct 1966, 47; 7 Oct 1962, 3.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
What was Ajijic like in 1967? Fortunately for us, that was the year when long-time journalist Ellis E. ‘Bill’ Reed reported from Ajijic on the status of the village’s sister city relationship with his home base of Studio City, California.
Reed, then the Executive Editor of the Valley Times in San Fernando, first highlighted the size difference between the two communities, explaining that Studio City had six times as many inhabitants as Ajijic, which he described as “a picturesque fishing village on beautiful Lake Chapala… now a community of 5,000.” He then explained to his readers how two Dane Chandos books—Village in the Sun and House in the Sun, both published in the 1940s—had introduced Ajijic to the English-speaking world: “Ajijic first gained fame as a Bohemian Center, but this has generally been replaced by a colony of serious writers and artists.”
Had this influx of foreigners had any impact on Ajijic? Reed noted that “Far from taking over the Americans have blended into the landscape and the only way you can tell their homes form those of the natives is by the screens on the windows. They have, however, brought in telephones and electricity.”
He also commented that “The bar at the Posada Ajijic is now in the earnest hands of former Hollywood producer Sherman Harris” and that “Climbing a hill at Chula Vista… is a Palm Springs-like subdivision of more than 100 lots, about 75 of them with occupied houses bearing names like ‘Dream’s End.’”
Photos accompanying Reed’s article illustrated a concert in a lakeshore park; fruit vendors, and two women cooking over an open fire on the beach.
Two of the images illustrating Bill Reed’s Valley Times article
The sister city program was one strand of the People-to-People initiative started by former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. The executive board of People to People held a lunch meeting at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala in 1964, a meeting attended by Eisenhower’s son (John D. Eisenhower), Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos, former president Miguel Alemán, the Jalisco state governor Juan Gil Preciado, who listened to a keynote address by Walt Disney (who claimed “Jalisco” was his favorite song).
In writing about the sister city connection between Ajijic and Studio City, Reed recalled how a contingent of Studio City residents and merchants had traveled to Ajijic in 1964 and decided that their efforts should be concentrated in youth programs, where the need was greatest. Funds were raised in Studio City funds to help remodel the boys school in Ajijic and provide uniforms for a youth soccer team. The following year a ten-person delegation from Ajijic visited Studio City. The Studio City Chamber of Commerce sponsored a letter writing exchange between students of the twinned communities and helped initiate a daily school breakfast program for 200 children in Ajijic. See also:
Long after Reed’s visit, this sister city connection was still going strong. For example, in 1977, Studio City residents organized a donation of medical supplies, including adjustable hospital beds, examination tables and assorted operating room equipment for Ajijic’s first public health clinic. They also raised funds to speed up construction of the village’s first purpose-built secondary school, which opened in 1983.
And who was Bill Reed?
Bill Reed had edited several other publications before joining the Valley Times, including the Daily Star-Progress in Brea-La Habra and the Daily Independent in Corona. Prior to living in California, Reed had worked as an editor and public relations executive in New York, where he had also taught marketing classes at New York University.
In an unusual claim to fame, Reed directed the first postwar tour of the landing beaches and battlefields of France in 1946, following which the entire group was invited by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (Wallis Simpson) to visit their chateau on the French Riviera. Reed had also been secretary of the International Management Congress in Brussels and a consultant to the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
Though I have yet to locate any details, Reed also apparently wrote several plays, texts on marketing and a regular syndicated column, “Broadway to Main Street.”
Sources
Citizen-News, 24 April 1967, A-9.
Ellis E. (Bill) Reed. 1967. “Quaint Lake Community Wins Fame.” San Fernando Valley Times (North Hollywood, California), 26 Dec 1967, 14.
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Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
The sculptor (María) Leticia Moreno Buenrostro (1930-2016) began her artistic career as a child. Moreno was born in Tizapán el Alto on the southern shore of Lake Chapala on 30 November 1930. Her grandfather and one of her uncles had apiaries, and Moreno used to take some of the wax to model small figurines of animals: horses, dogs and cats. She later began to make human forms by carving sticks she found in her own garden.
Moreno entered the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (San Carlos) in Mexico City in 1953, and graduated from that institution in 1957. She was awarded a Masters in Fine Arts in 1960 and taught wood sculpting at the Escuela Nacional for fifty years before retiring in 2009. Several of her students have gone on to become professional sculptors.
Moreno produced 61 major wood sculptures during her career. Because she chose to live for her art, not from her art, she exhibited only infrequently. Her major shows, all in Mexico City, were at the Bienal de Escultura del Museo de Arte Moderno (1979), the Museo Universitario del Chopo and the Academia de San Carlos. Moreno was awarded a second place medal in a competition among the teachers in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas.
In 1990, Moreno was commissioned to design a coat-of-arms for her native town, Tizapán del Alto. Below the name (derived from “place of Tizatl, where the river passes”) is a circle adorned with blue green feathers, from which protrude six obsidian-tipped arrows. The central area of the shield includes a representation of the Río de la Pasión entering Lake Chapala, along with two stylized buildings made of reeds and thatch, with a line of footsteps indicating the long journey made by the town’s ancestors to reach this idyllic location.
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Chapter 4 of Lake Chapala: A Postcard History is devoted to the early history and importance of Tizapán el Alto and the southern shore of Lake Chapala.
Emma Rueda Ramírez. 2011. “María Leticia Moreno Buenrostro: Árbola Fecunda” in AAPAUNAM, Vol. 3, Num. 1
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
This year (2023) marks the centenary of D H Lawrence’s visit to Chapala, where he wrote Quetzalcoatl, the first draft of The Plumed Serpent. At some point in the trip, almost certainly en route to Chapala, Lawrence stayed at the Hotel Ribera Castellanos (located on the lakeshore between Ocotlán and Jamay). This hotel, often called simply Hotel Ribera, no longer exists, but has numerous literary claims to fame dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, when the property was owned by Ignacio Castellanos and his wife, poet Esther Tapia de Castellanos.
In The Plumed Serpent, Ocotlán became Ixtlahuacan (chapter V) and the Hotel Ribera Castellanos the Orilla Hotel (chapters V, VI).
“The hotel consisted of an old low ranch-house with a veranda — and this was the dining-room, lounge, kitchen, and office. Then there was a two-storey new wing, with a smart bathroom between each two bedrooms, and almost up-to-date fittings: very incongruous.
But the new wing was unfinished — had been unfinished for a dozen years and more, the work abandoned when Porfirio Diaz fled. Now it would probably never be finished.” (chapter V)
In the following chapter, Lawrence explained how the “Orilla, which had begun to be a winter paradise for the Americans” had suffered badly during the Revolution but that “In 1921 a feeble new start had been made” and “the hotel was very modestly opened again, with an American manager.” (chapter VI)
That American hotel manager (named Bell in chapter VI) was hotelier-photographer Winfield Scott, who had actually become manager of the Hotel Ribera in 1919. By the time of Lawrence’s visit, Scott had moved on to manage the Hotel Arzapalo in Chapala. When Lawrence and his wife rented a house in Chapala, their traveling companions—Witter Bynner and ‘Spud’ Johnson—took rooms at the Arzapalo. Scott needed little prompting to regale Lawrence and his friends with all kinds of stories of the old days.
Dwight Furness. c 1907. Hotel Ribera. (Fig 6-6 of Lake Chapala: A Postcard History)
But when and why was the Hotel Ribera first built? In 1902, American entrepreneur Dwight Furness, who had numerous business interests in Guanajuato, bought the estate from the Castellanos family. Having seen the obvious success of the purpose-built Hotel Arzapalo which opened its doors in Chapala in 1898, Furness envisioned an even grander resort hotel on this lakeside property near the main Mexico City-Guadalajara railroad line, alongside a modern “summer colony” of vacation homes for the wealthy. Plans were announced to add a health spa, golf links and bowling alley. Construction of the first homes and the Hotel Ribera began in 1904. One of the first to build a cottage close to the hotel was Arturo Braniff, from Mexico City, who also bought a much grander house, the Casa Pérez Verdía, in Chapala for his widowed mother.
The Hotel Ribera advertised with the the tagline, “The Riviera of Mexico” and claimed to be a “Sportsman’s Paradise.” It quickly became a highly desirable and popular destination, where all manner of politicians and celebrities would hob-nob over the next decade. Shortly after Furness added 60 more rooms in 1909, journalist Winifred Martin vacationed there; she remarked on the colorful flora and fauna and described the hotel as “picturesque and charming with lawns sloping steeply to the water’s edge… the long rambling building with its tiled roof fits well into the setting.”
When pioneering female travel writer Marie Wright, author of two non-fiction books about Mexico, visited in 1910, she lauded the Ribera as “a fine new hotel of modern equipment.” The following year, Juan Kaiser, the Swiss-born store owner and publisher (responsible for some of the finest early postcards of Chapala and Guadalajara) stayed at the hotel to recover from a relapse of malaria. Not long afterwards, veteran traveler writer Harry Franck arrived by boat from Chapala and stayed a couple of nights, before taking the hotel launch across the lake to La Palma to continue his herculean hike through Mexico.
In February 1911, prolific American children’s writer Emily Huntington Miller (1833-1913), who founded “The Little Corporal”—the first serial magazine for children published in the US—stayed at the Hotel Ribera.
In 1916, Janet M Cummings photographed Lake Chapala for National Geographic. Cummings was one of the first female photographers ever to have work published by that august magazine. She took the image titled “Water carriers at Lake Chapala” in Ocotlán, presumably during a short stay at the Hotel Ribera.
When the Mexican Revolution prompted Dwight Furness and his family to leave Mexico, the Hotel Ribera was sold to Enrique Langenscheidt Schwartz, a prominent German businessman living in Guanajuato. Tragically, his son, Enrique Langenscheidt Jr., was murdered there by bandits in 1919. Despite Scott’s best efforts to revive business, the hotel gradually lost popularity and clientele.
By the time travel writer Edna Mae Stark argued in 1930 that “The most modern town on the shores of Lake Chapala is Ribera Castellanos, which is destined for popularity as a vacation resort. With a good hotel as headquarters, guests may fish, or hunt, swim or ride horseback, go motoring or sailing,” the hotel was in terminal decline. All that remains today of this once-grand lakeside resort are a few ruined walls.
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Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Artist and author Henry F. Edwards lived in Ajijic, with his wife, Corinne, and their numerous children, for many years in the 1960s and 1970s.
Henry ‘Hank’ Edwards was born on 9 May 1933 and completed studies at the University of New Mexico; San Diego State University; and the University of California. He served in the Navy on the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La and then worked for a decade in the space industry, as a scientist-engineer on advanced satellites. Having made profitable investments, he retired young to travel the world; the family lived in several different countries before settling at Lake Chapala for more than a decade, most of the time in Ajijic, and a much shorter time on the southern shore of the lake.
Edwards published and republished several books. The one most directly related to Ajijic is titled The Sweet Bird of Youth . This book, published in 2008, consists of two parts: “Fall of the Globo” and “Living the Lucky Life,” previously published in 1977 and 1997 respectively.
“Fall of the Globo” is a fictionalized memoir of his time in Ajijic. Ajijic is renamed Tzipan in the book, and Jocotepec becomes San Pedro, while Henry and Corinne become Harold and Colleen. The book is a roman à clef, where many of the characters are only thinly disguised. It includes stories about building the Edwards’ family home, nicknamed “El Castillo” because of its castle-like turret, a couple of blocks north of Seis Esquinas. They had previously rented a property at Independencia #41, where artist John K Peterson later lived for a time.
Parts ofPlaying Prince in a Palace (2009) also relate to the family’s time in Mexico, while The View from Across the Lake(originally published in 2002) is about life on the southern shore of the lake before they then decided to move to Guatemala.
Edwards also penned an article titled “On Lake Chapala” for the Lake Chapala Review, which offers a chatty account of what life in Ajijic was like when he and his family lived in the village. The illustration accompanying that article was drawn by Simón Velásquez, son of long-time village artists Enrique and Belva Velásquez.
What was Ajijic like when Hank Edwards was living there? Well, it was a lot smaller than it is today, as evidenced by this simplified sketch map drawn by Hank and included in The Sweet Bird of Youth:
Sketch map of Ajijic, c. 1970, by Henry F Edwards.
The ‘paved road’ is the current carretera, completed in the early 1950s, a decade before Edwards arrived in Ajijic. (A 1976 US newspaper quotes Edwards as planning to spend summers on San Juan Island, “and the winters in Ajijic where we have lived for the past eight years.”) The line labelled ‘End of Town’ on the map is especially instructive in that there was apparently very little construction north of the carretera, even in about 1960. The “Castillo” was on the edge of the town.
Edwards pursued his art interests while in Ajijic, and held a one man show of 36 oils, done over five years, at what was then the Jalisco state gallery in La Floresta.
Edwards exhibited in a group show in March 1976 at the “José Clemente Orozco Gallery” in Ajijic, a gallery directed by Dionicio Morales at a location three blocks from the plaza on Guadalupe Victoria. Other artists in that show included Jonathan Aparicio, Frank Barton, Antonio Cárdenas, Antonio López Vega, Dionicio Morales, Julian Pulido, Sid Schwartzman, and Havano Tadeo.
Hank and Corinne (Bush) Edwards co-starred as the leading couple in the farce “Here Lies Jeremy Troy” presented by the Lakeside Little Theater in April 1976 at the Chula Vista Country Club. Corinne had performed in Victoria, BC, Canada, and in several previous Lakeside Little Theater productions.
At the time of “”Here Lies Jeremy Troy,” Hank Edwards apparently sponsored the short-lived Wes Penn Gallery (named for the deceased artist ex-husband of author Jan Dunlap). The gallery was trying to organize a two-person exhibit of paintings by Peter Huf and his wife, Eunice Hunt Huf, who, after living in Ajijic for many years, had moved back to Germany. A short press comment adds that, “Hank Edwards and Corinne Bush plan to leave Ajijic at the end of April, at which time the Wes Penn Gallery will be managed by Cristina Rigby of Jocotepec.” Cristina Rigby, it is worth noting, was the wife of British Hollywood writer Ray Rigby (The Hill).
Henry Edwards. c 1970. Street scene.
Hank and Corinne left Ajijic in May 1976, after throwing a medieval costume party for Frank and Kathy Barton who had taken over “El Castillo,” but returned the following year, when Hank became an active member of the informal cultural group TLAC (Todas las Artes Combinadas).
At the end of the 1970s, Edwards and his wife moved back to the US, where they lived in Oregon and Arizona. Corinne died in about 2016. When I was last in touch with Henry, several years ago, he still owned an island in the middle of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, an island where he and his wife had once hoped to build a castle . . .
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My sincere thanks to both Alan Pattison and Henry Edwards for sharing their memories of Ajijic with me via phone, in July 2014 and November 2016 respectively.
Sources
Henry F Edwards. 2008. The Sweet Bird of Youth (BookSurge)
___2009. Playing Prince in a Palace (BookSurge)
___2009. The View from Across the Lake (BookSurge)
___2007. “On Lake Chapala,” Lake Chapala Review, April 2007
Guadalajara Reporter: 13 March 1976, 21; 3 April 1976, 31; 3 April 1976; 22 May 1976, 22; 16 Apr 1977, 19.
The Islands Sounder: 10 Nov 1976, 19.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
This post considers the extraordinarily productive career of historian Álvaro Ochoa Serrano, who has dedicated much of his life to writing about his two main loves: Lake Chapala and mariachi (in its broad historical sense of music, folkloric dancing and partying).
These two interests are not necessarily as unrelated as you might think since some linguists believe that the word mariachi derives from the indigenous Coca language, spoken at the lake centuries ago.
From birth, Ochoa was destined to become a historian of Lake Chapala. Having been born in 1948 in La Barca, Jalisco, his birth was registered in Jiquilpan, Michoacán, so he started life with one foot in each of the two states that border the lake.
Ochoa gained his bachelor’s degree at the Escuela Normal Superior De Mexico (1978), and then completed his masters in history at the Iberoamerican University (1988) and a PhD in history (1998) at the Universidad of California, Los Ángeles. He is a member of Mexico’s National Researchers’ System, and of the National Commission for the Preservation of Mariachi.
For many than 35 years, Ochoa has been a professor and researcher in the Zamora-based Colegio de Michoacán, where his major projects included one titled “Personajes y tradiciones populares del Occidente de México”. (Characters and Popular Traditions of Western Mexico). The Colegio de Michoacán, which was directed for many years by distinguished environmental anthropologist Brigitte Boehm Schondübe (1938-2005), has a long tradition of outstanding academic research related to Lake Chapala.
During his distinguished academic career, Ochoa has contributed articles to dozens of journals and has co-authored Breve Historia de Michoacán (2011) and Cancionero Michoacano 1830-1940, Canciones, Cantos, Pirekuas, Coplas y Corridos (second edition in press).
Books of his sole authorship include Los Insurgentes de Mezcala (1985); Viajes de michoacanos al norte (1998); Los agraristas de Atacheo (1989); … Y nos volvemos a encontrar: migración, identidad y tradición cultural (2001); Resplandor de la Tierra Caliente michoacana: paisaje y sociedad en la era colonial (2004); Los Insurrectos de Mezcala y Marcos. Relación crónica de una resistencia en Chapala (2007); La música va a otra parte. Mariache México-USA (2015); Mitote, Fandango y Mariacheros (2018); Afrodescendientes, Sobre Piel Canela (2020); La Ciénega de Chapala. Cuatro textos a flote (2023).
Ochoa’s work related to mariachi gained him a prestigious Vicente Mendoza Award. His beautifully written paper directly connecting Lake Chapala and mariachi, titled “Chapala, otra cuna del mariachi” (Chapala, another cradle of mariachi), will be published by El Colegio de Jalisco later this year.
Ochoa’s books are available via Spanish-language bookstores and online via http://www.libreriacolmich.com/ amazon.com.mx and bookstore sites such as https://www.gandhi.com.mx (tip: search using “Alvaro Ochoa Serrano”)
Note
Though we never met in person, I am greatly indebted to Brigitte Boehm Schondübe, whose very kind words in print helped inspire my own efforts to disseminate a greater understanding of the ecology and history of the Lake Chapala area.
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Chapter 6 of Lake Chapala: A Postcard History is an English-language account of some of the changes that occurred in the area near Ocotlán during the twentieth century.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
More than sixty years after his first solo exhibit in 1951, Canadian artist Duncan de Kergommeaux displayed a series of charcoal and graphite on mylar drawings called “Winter Days,” completed following a visit to Lake Chapala in 2006.
Duncan de Kergommeaux was born in Premier, in northern British Columbia, on 15 July 1927. His career as an artist began in 1951 at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta, and in Victoria, British Columbia, under the Czech artist Jan Zach. In 1953 de Kergommeaux completed a mural for the Victoria Times in Victoria, B.C.
He then moved to Ottawa, Ontario. During his seventeen years there, he taught art, painted, and founded the Blue Barn Gallery. He also continued to study art. From 1955-57 de Kergommeaux took summer classes at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Then, in 1958 he used a Canada Council Grant to to travel in Mexico and study at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende. Among the paintings from that trip auctioned in recent years are several seascapes and the gouache abstract titled “Cathedral interior, Mexico.”
From 1970 to 1993, de Kergommeaux was professor of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. While on the faculty there de Kergommeaux took three full-year study leaves in New York City (1980-81), Paris and New York City (1984-85) and Paris (1989-90).
In his long artistic career, which has spanned more than five decades, de Kergommeaux has held more than 50 solo exhibitions across Canada, and his work has been included in dozens of group shows, including the Third and Sixth Biennials of Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada. During 1967-68 the National Gallery circulated his work and that of George de Niverville in a two-person exhibit that traveled across Canada. One of his paintings hangs in the dining room of the Prime Minister’s Residence at 24 Sussex Drive, and several others hang in Rideau Hall (the official residence of the Governor General of Canada). Three years after his retirement from academia in 1993, a permanent study collection of his works was established at Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa.
Duncan de Kergommeaux. 2006. Winter days Lake Chapala #4. Credit: Ottawa Art Gallery.
In 2006, de Kergommereaux spent some weeks in San Juan Cosalá on Lake Chapala, where he completed a body of work depicting the lake. These works were included in a solo show titled “New Horizons” at the Wallack Galleries in Ottawa, Ontario, the following year. A reviewer for the Ottawa Citizen wrote that his [Lake Chapala] work:
shares the artist’s fascination with capturing the same view at different times. This series of Lake Chapala and the village of San Juan Cosala that hugs its shoreline is dark and brooding, with grays and black predominating, although in some, the darkness is slightly relieved by hints of violet, blue, green, pink and red.”
In a refreshingly forthright statement to the reviewer, the 80-year-old de Kergommereaux stated that “”I think that many artists spend far too much time talking about their paintings. I honestly do. They explain them to death.”
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Connie Higginson-Murray. 2007. “New vistas at gallery. Artist’s first solo exhibit in Ottawa in 20 years.” The Ottawa Citizen, 28 November 2007.
Wallach Galleries. 2007. “Duncan de Kergommeaux: New Horizons.”
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Lona Mae Christians, later Isoard, (1903-1992) was a long-time resident of Ajijic in the 1960s and 1970s. She was born 8 November 1903 in Williamsburg, Colorado, and died 22 Sep 1992 in Walnut Creek, California, aged 88. Lona married her husband, Max Conlin Isoard (1900-1974), then a medical student, in June 1926. The couple had a daughter, Antoinette Ruth (Toni) Isoard, born in about 1940.
The family lived mostly in California, first in San Francisco (1928), then Sacramento (from 1930-at least 1955). In September 1951, Lona and Max Isoard arrived back in New York from Le Havre, France, on board the SS Liberté.
A 1938 newspaper article reveals that Isoard was a well-known polo player: “Among the players in the first game, will be Mrs. Lona Isoard, prominent in state polo circles.”
Lona Isoard: Fruit Still Life (ca 1972)
By all accounts, Lona Mae Isoard was quite an eccentric character. The late Tom Faloon commented to me that she was a “nutty lady”, adding that her sister and brother-in-law also lived in Ajijic. Katie Goodridge Ingram, former gallery owner, remembers that Lona lived at one time in the small, lakeside cottage belonging to “Russian” dancer Zara. (This cottage later became known as “Iona’s cottage”, taking its name from another eccentric American, a former teacher and world traveler, Iona Kupiec, who lived there from 1962).
In 1966, Lona Isoard remodeled a home in Ajijic at Calle Independencia #39 for herself, and an adjoining home, sharing the same street address, was occupied by her younger sister, Henrietta (and her husband, Herbert B. Phillips).
The following year, Lona spent three months visiting her daughter in California, where the two women acted together on stage in Oakland, California, in April 1967 in a production of the farce Botheration.
Isoard was active in the local Ajijic art scene and occasionally exhibited. For example, her work was included in the May 1971 group show, “Fiesta of Art”, held at the private home of Mr and Mrs E. D. Windham, Calle 16 de Septiembre #33, Ajijic. (The other artists involved were Daphne Aluta;Mario Aluta; Beth Avary; Charles Blodgett; Antonio Cárdenas; Alan Davoll; Alice de Boton; Robert de Boton; Tom Faloon; John Frost; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Peter Huf; Eunice (Hunt) Huf; Michael Heinichen; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael; Bert Miller; Robert Neathery; John K. Peterson; Stuart Phillips; Hudson Rose; Mary Rose; Jesús Santana; Walt Shou; Frances Showalter; Sloane; Eleanor Smart; Robert Snodgrass; and Agustín Velarde.)
Lona showed a self portrait in the TLAC (Todos las artes combinados) show at Posada Ajijic in April 1978.
An example of Isoard’s work, a still life of fruit, was included (along with works by many of the other artists in the 1971 group show) in A Cookbook with Color Reproductions by Artists from the Galería(Guadalajara, Mexico: Boutique d’Artes Gráficas, 1972).
Note: This is a revised version of a post first published 28 January 2016.
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American artist Garrett Van Vranken (1887-1961) and his wife, Tommie (Thomy) E Carruthers Van Vranken (1888-1962), lived their final years in Chapala.
George Garrett Van Vranken (sometimes Vanvranken) was born in Cadillac, Michigan, on 16 December 1887. He completed four years of high school before serving in the military during the first world war. Known for his pastels and commercial art, it is claimed by one source that Van Vranken was an alumnus of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tommie (Thomy) E Carruthers, born in Florida 5 March 1888, died in Chapala 23 January 1962. She had completed one year of college and was living in Los Angeles when she and Garret married in about 1925. She is recorded in the 1930 US census as owning a Los Angeles advertising agency, while her husband is listed as an artist.
Garrett Van Vranken. Commercial artwork, c 1936.
Garrett Van Vranken appears to have been a founder member of the local (Los Angeles) group of members of the American Artists Congress, and combined his personal fine arts career with commercial work.
His painting “Three by the Sea” (below) was shown in the first exhibition of works by local members of the American Artists Congress at the Stanley Rose Galleries in Los Angeles in September 1936: “Garrett Van Vranken shows a good figure composition, “Three by the Sea” which links the “modern” side of the show with the various still lifes and flower pieces of academic vein.”
Garrett Van Vranken. “Three by the Sea,” c 1936.
The local group of the American Artists Congress, which later had its own gallery on Hollywood Boulevard, had been formed about eighteen months earlier.
In 1942, at least one painting by Van Vranken was included in a group show of works by “artists employed in aircraft factories,” a show held at Raymond & Raymond Galleries on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles. The following year, his painting “Woman on White” was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum in the Fourth Annual Exhibition of Work of Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity.
After his retirement in the early 1950s, Van Vranken and his wife moved from Los Angeles to Mexico, apparently initially to the border town of Brownsville, Texas, and then to Lake Chapala, where they established their home at Calle Juárez #512. It remains unclear whether or not Van Vranken painted or exhibited while living in Chapala.
Garrett Van Vranken died on 13 April 1961, and his wife, Tommie, died on 23 January the following year. There was some confusion about Garrett’s date of death; his wife confirmed to US authorities when they filed the official Report of the Death of a US citizen Abroad that her husband had died on 13 April 1961, and not on 20 April, as stated in the formal registration of his death in Chapala.
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Robert Lewis Taylor (1912-1998) worked as a journalist on the St Louis Post-Dispatch before joining the staff of the New Yorker magazine. He wrote numerous books in a productive literary career which spanned four decades and included a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for his novel The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, a novel about the travails of a 14-year-old boy and his father during the 1849 California gold rush.
Taylor was a frequent visitor to Ajijic from about 1973, and kept a home there (“Casa Sastre”) until at least 1978. Bill Atkinson, a longtime Chapala resident who knew Taylor, once proudly showed me the copy Taylor had given him of his biography of W. C. Fields, with a personal inscription dated 1974.
During his time in Ajijic, Taylor focused on writing books. Interviewed by a journalist in 1978, Taylor, then 65 years old, explained that he preferred research (“digging is such good fun”) to writing, and that he had devoted the past five or six years to writing books:
Every morning I get up at 5:30 a.m. and, oozing pain from every pore, I drink some coffee and then I start writing and keep it up until about 1 p.m. without leaving my desk.
At our home in Ajijic, Mexico (he and his wife also have homes in Connecticut and Florida which they use frequently) I’ve got the housekeeper trained to keep people away from me. She’s marvelous! When she’s there no one gets to see me before I’m through working.”
In the afternoons he relaxed by playing tennis, swimming, lifting barbells and shooting pool.
Adapted for TV, 1963
Robert Lewis Taylor, was born in Carbondale, Illinois on 24 September 1912. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign he worked at the Carbondale Herald and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for three years and had articles published in the Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest. Taylor joined the New Yorker in 1939 and continued to write for the magazine until 1961, even submitting copy during the years he served in the Navy (1942-1946). He married Judith Martin in 1945.
None of Taylor’s writing was specifically about Mexico, though two of his novels do relate to Mexico as it was in the early nineteenth century. A Journey to Matecumbe (1961), the story of a boy on a journey from Illinois to the Florida Keys, was adapted in 1976 as the Disney movie Treasure of Matecumbe. Two Roads to Guadalupe (1964) recounts the adventures of two brothers who served with Alexander Doniphan’s Missouri Volunteers in the Mexican War of 1846-48.
Taylor’s other published books include: Adrift in a Boneyard (1947), Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief (1948), W.C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes (1949), The Running Pianist (1950), Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness (1952), The Bright Sands (1954), Center Ring: The People of the Circus (956), Vessels of Wrath: The Life and Times of Carry Nation (1966), A Roaring in the Wind: Being a History of Alder Gulch, Montana (1977), and Niagara (1980).
His obituary in the New York Times remembered him in his prime “as tall and good-looking, a brilliant comic writer and sharply—some say caustically—witty.”
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Barbara Stewart. 1998. “Robert Lewis Taylor Is Dead, Novelist and Biographer, 88.” (obituary). New York Times, 4 October 1998.
Brownsville Herald: 4 November 1976.
Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek): 19 February 1978, 35.
Michael Hargraves. 1992. Lake Chapala: A literary survey; plus an historical overview with some personal observations and reflections of this lakeside area of Jalisco, Mexico. Los Angeles: Michael Hargraves.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Talented British artists Richard and Nancy Carline never lived in Ajijic, but did visit friends in the village more than once and completed several paintings of the area.
Richard Cotton Carline (1896-1980) was born in Oxford to a family of painters. After studying in Paris, and doing some teaching, he working on developing camouflage designs for the military before serving on the Western Front and in the Middle East as an Official War Artist during the first world war. During the second world war, Carline wrote the Ministry of Aircraft Production’s official report on industrial and aircraft camouflage; his work on camouflage projects was highlighted in a 2016 exhibition at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum. The quality of his work as war artist and camouflage expert is almost unparalleled.
Richard Carline. Carrying burdens in Mexico. Credit: Christie’s.
In the interwar period, Carline taught at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford and held his first solo show at the Goupil Gallery in 1931. He was an active member of the AIA (Artists’ International Association) and, according to Mexican art critic Justino Fernández [1], spent eight months in Mexico in 1936. The more commonly repeated version is that Carline visited the USA and Mexico in 1937-1938, where he was impressed by both the value of public murals and the value of encouraging them via such programs as the Federal Art Project.
In the early 1940s, on behalf of the AIA (Artists’ International Association), Carline lobbied for the UK to have a public mural program, based on those in Mexico and the US, as a way of enabling artists to contribute to the war effort. Sadly, the AIA’s efforts met with only limited success, but did not deter Carline from establishing a National Mural Council in 1943 to promote the commissioning of murals by industry. Three years later, Carline was chosen as the first Art Counsellor of UNESCO.
Richard Carline. 1975. Ajijic after rain. Credit: Canterbury Auctions
Carline was an aficionado of picture postcards and wrote Pictures in the Post: Story of the Picture Postcard and Its Place in the History of Popular Art, first published in 1959. He also wrote The Arts of West Africa (1935), Draw they Must (1968) and Stanley Spencer at War (1978).
Richard and Nancy Carline married in 1950 and had two children, one of whom (Herminone) is also a professional artist.
Nancy Mona Carline (née Higgins) (1909-2004) trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and then worked at the Sadlers Wells Ballet, where she met Vladimir Polunin, who encouraged her to return to the Slade and take the course he was teaching in stage design.
Nancy Carline was an ardent advocate of art education and exhibited regularly, including in shows arranged by the Royal Academy, the London Group, the New English Art Club, the Artists’ International Association, and the Wildenstein Gallery. A retrospective of her life’s work was held at the Camden Arts Centre in 1980.
Though the details of Richard Carline’s first trips to Mexico remain unclear, his later visits, accompanied by wife Nancy, were to visit Laura and Jack Bateman and their children in Ajijic. Laura Bateman ran an art gallery in Ajijic for many years. How the two couples first met each other is unclear, but they became firm friends. Based on the dates of paintings of Lake Chapala completed by the Carlines, they visited Mexico in 1967 and 1975, and perhaps on other occasions as well. Shortly after their 1975 trip, Richard Carline wrote to German artist Dr. Frederick Solomon (1899-1980) in New Hampshire explaining that he had returned to Lake Chapala because he “found it so fruitful for painting.” But, because they had bought a reduced fare ticket, “we did not have very long in Mexico – but by going to paint we can deduct this as an expense of artists from income tax.”
Paintings by both artists were sold by the Canterbury Auction Galleries in the UK in 2020. Richard’s “After Rain Ajijic Mexico 1967” had a pencil inscription stating it had been exhibited at the London Group in 1968/9. Two Lake Chapala-related paintings by Nancy were in the same auction: “Ajijic Mexico Lake Chapala”, and “Mexico” (which had “Ajijic” and “1975″ written on the back).
The Carlines’ close friendship with the Bateman family had another very significant link to the Lake Chapala art world. The Bateman’s eldest daughter, Alice, after attending a village school in Ajijic, studied art for a year at the University of Guadalajara in 1963. The following year Alice lived with the Carlines in London, when she moved to the UK to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art (now Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design). Alice Bateman, who later also studied sculpting in Italy, lives in Texas and has enjoyed a stellar career as a sculptor.
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[1] Justino Fernández. 1969. Catálogo de las Exposiciones de Arte en el año 1968. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Calvin Tomkins, who later wrote extensively for Newsweek and the New Yorker, completed his first novel Intermission while staying at Lake Chapala. The autobiographical novel was first published by Viking Press, New York, in 1951. The book is not set at the lake; its locales are Santa Fe, New York and New Jersey. It explores the tricky and sometimes difficult relationships between two brothers, one of whom is the narrator, and one of their oldest friends and his wife.
Tomkins was born in Orange, New Jersey, on 17 December 1925. After graduating from Berkshire School, he served two years in the US Navy, and then completed a degree program at Princeton University in 1948. Still in his early twenties, and newly married with an urge to write, he got lucky: Tomkins’ father, a New Jersey businessman, offered to finance an entire year for him to focus on trying to become a writer. Calvin and his wife rented a place in Santa Fe, and Calvin began drafting the story which turned into Intermission.
After some months in Santa Fe, the young couple decided to visit Mexico where they:
“ended up in a place outside of Guadalajara, at a pretty little inn by Lake Chapala. . . We were there three or four months, and I wrote there, too. It was a kind of Hemingway-esque experience for me. I remember finishing the manuscript there and sending it to my agent. I heard back a few weeks later that it had been accepted by Viking Press!”
On their return to the US, Tomkins struggled to write a second novel, but did get several short stories published. To make ends meet, he became a journalist, working first for Radio Free Europe (1953-1957) and then Newsweek. He had a freelance contribution to the New Yorker accepted in 1958, and joined the magazine two years later as a staff writer. In addition to short stories and humor pieces, he branched out into nonfiction. Over two decades, he focused on chronicling the rapidly evolving New York City art scene. He was the New Yorker’s official art critic in the early 1980s, and responsible for hundreds of art reviews and profiles for the magazine’s “Art World” column.
Besides Intermission, Tomkins’ major published works include: The bride & the bachelors: the heretical courtship in modern art (1965); The Lewis and Clark Trail (1965); The world of Marcel Duchamp (1966); Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey (1969); Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1970); Living Well Is the Best Revenge: The Life of Gerald and Sara Murphy (1971); The Scene: Reports on Post-Modern Art (1976); Off the Wall : A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (1980); Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (2013); and The Lives of Artists (2019).
In retirement, Tomkins donated his papers to the Museum of Modern Art and his art-book archive to the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island.
Acknowledgment
My sincere thanks to artist Peter Holden for bringing Calvin Tomkins’ important link to Lake Chapala to my attention.
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Does anyone recognize the artist who painted this attractive gouache of a village scene? It is dated ’62. The indistinct signature appears to start with “PETER” in block capitals.
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Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Multilingual playwright Samuel McCulloch (1921-1991) and his wife, Jennie, lived in an old adobe house in Ajijic for six years from 1956 to 1962. In a 1958 press interview, McCulloch told a reporter that in Ajijic he was writing plays, working daily from 11 am to 7 pm, with a break for lunch, and that “When we first went there two years ago, we had electricity only at night. Now we’ve got it round the clock, except when the plant is broken down, which is every few days.” McCulloch named the plant operator as “Pancho de la Luz” and added that there were “about 75 Americans in Ajijic, many of them retired business and professional men and their wives.”
Sam and Jennie McCulloch, 1972. Credit: Concordia Sentinel.
Born on 9 February 1921 in Memphis, Tennessee, McCulloch was educated at Central High School, Memphis, and Choate School in Connecticut. (Coincidentally, a former teacher at the Choate School—novelist Christopher Veiel—had lived in Ajijic a few years earlier.) McCulloch then studied at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, before graduating with a degree in English and Greek from Southwestern (now Rhodes College) in his hometown.
During the second world war, McCulloch served with the US Army as an interpreter and interrogator of prisoners of war in Africa, Italy and France, work which improved his command of German, Italian, French and Spanish.
After the war ended, McCulloch took classes at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Perugia, Italy, before completing an MA in drama at Syracuse. In 1947 he registered the copyright of a film script, apparently never published, titled “The Turning Point.”
In 1952 he returned to Memphis and helped found the Arena Theatre in Memphis, Tennessee; McCulloch also operated a summer theater in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The Arena lasted only a couple of years, but attracted stars such as John Carradine and Eva Gabor to perform in its plays. The theatre ran into censorship problems in 1953 when McCulloch adapted Erskine Caldwell’s novel Tragic Ground, which features a young man and woman in bed, but clothed. The performances were duly moved to a nightclub in West Memphis.
It was at the Arena that McCuloch met his wife, Jennie Keeter, who had majored in English at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina, and took a part-time gig as a volunteer usher. Not long after the Arena folded, the couple couple moved to Ajijic. In his 1958 interview, McCulloch claimed to have been writing most of the time; in a later interview he claimed that in Ajijic the couple “did absolutely nothing for six years.”
What did McCulloch and his wife think of Ajijic. When they returned briefly to Memphis in 1959, Sam told a local newspaper that He had just put a manuscript in the mail, that “Harper’s is bringing out a novel soon by one of our people” and that “The Golden Fleecing,” written by another Ajijican, Lorenzo Semple Jr, had recently received good notices on Broadway. (Note that it is unclear which Harper’s novel was being referred to; Willard Marsh’s Week With No Friday, set in Ajijic, was not released by Harper’s until 1965.)
However, even if McCulloch was optimistic about his writing career, he reported that Ajijic was “now crawling with Americans so Jennie and I are sneaking around at night, putting up “Yankee Go Home” signs.” Goodness only knows what McCulloch might say if he were able to visit Ajijic today!
After their extended vacation in Mexico, McCulloch joined the US Information Service and the couple spent three years in Paraguay, followed by stints in Chile, Guatemala and Washington DC, where McCulloch was cultural coordinator for Latin America.
Sam and Jenny McCulloch retired to Jonesville, Lousiana, in 1972, shortly after buying a home, sight unseen, on Horseshoe Lake. Mementos from their time in Mexico and their travels were proudly displayed in their lakeside home.
McCulloch died in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on 17 March 1991, shortly after his 70th birthday.
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Of all the notable artists associated with Lake Chapala, the one who made the most waves in international art circles in the latter part of the twentieth century was Feliciano Béjar.
Feliciano (‘Chano’) Béjar was born on 14 July 1920 in Jiquilpan, Michoacán. Jiquilpan had been in close proximity to Lake Chapala for centuries until the eastern third of the lake was drained for agriculture a decade before Béjar was born.
A self-taught artist, who overcame polio as a child, Béjar was revered for his inspired sculptures, painting and weaving. His most famous series of works, dubbed ‘magiscopes,’ imaginatively combined glass with metals, plastics and other recycled materials; they stimulate viewers awareness of the unlimited power of the human eye to see and interpret abstract sculptures.
Feliciano Bejar. Boat seller.
Béjar attended the Colegio Salesiano of Guadalajara (1932-1934) and his childhood interest in art was stimulated by meeting José Clemente Orozco when that great artist was painting his remarkable murals in Jiquilpan in 1940.
There is little point in me rehashing all the details of Béjar’s life, which are readily available online, including in this Wikipedia article.
If it had not been for serendipity, Béjar might never have become an acclaimed artist. He had traveled widely in Mexico before leaving for New York in 1945 to work, paint and buy himself a Chevrolet. Béjar painted during the day and worked nights in a department store.
Feliciano Bejar. Posada del niño
In 1947 he left some paintings at a frame shop which, by chance, was patronized by gallery owner Ward Eggleston. Helped by Nathaniel Coleman and his wife, a wealthy art-loving couple who had struck up a friendship with Béjar in the department store, Eggleston made arrangements to hold a solo show of Béjar’s work at his gallery the following year.
Meanwhile, Béjar had bought a car (despite not knowing how to drive) and persuaded a friend to drive him and the car back to Jiquilpan. Shortly after their safe arrival, his friend borrowed the vehicle to visit his own family; unfortunately he then totaled the automobile in an accident.
Béjar returned to New York for his solo show, the first of several he would hold at the Ward Eggleston Galleries. Nathaniel Coleman remained his chief promoter and sponsor; he purchased some two hundred of Béjar’s works over the years; the terms of his will meant that more than half of them eventually returned to the artist.
Feliciano Bejar.Sunset at Lake Chapala
According to a contemporary review of the first New York show, at the Ward Eggleston Galleries in 1948:
“It was difficult to leave the Ward Eggleston Galleries after viewing the paintings of Chano Bejar without being haunted long afterwards by the pinks and yellows and greens in his “Fiery Horse,” a dream creature out of Mexican Indian mythology who flamed and quivered with motion that threatened to shatter the very canvas which held him.”
Béjar’s art remained unrecognized in Mexico, until after he was sponsored by UNESCO to travel to Europe in 1949 for a group show of Latin-American artists which included several of his works. On his return, the Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales took a keen interest and arranged several shows over the next few years. A retrospective exhibit of his works in Los Angeles in 1956 was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. These shows helped establish Béjar’s reputation and resulted in dozens more solo shows. UNESCO produced a film in 1964, “The world of Feliciano Béjar,” and Béjar’s work featured in the Mexican pavilion at the New York World Fair in 1965. During his long artistic career, Béjar held more than 150 solo shows in Mexico, the US and Europe.
Two early Chapala-related paintings deserve a special mention. Béjar’s solo show at the Galeria José María Velasco in Mexico City in 1962 included “Tuxcueca.” Completed in 1947, this painting of a humble village on the south shore of Lake Chapala is probably the only time the village has ever been painted by a major artist. A second 1947 oil on canvas was included in Béjar’s 1965 show at Galeria Mer-kup, also in Mexico City: it was titled ‘Chapala.’
Feliciano Bejar. Three magiscopes.
Magiscopes were first shown in 1966 at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and at Mappin Art Gallery in London, UK. Inspired by childhood toys and games, Béjar’s magiscopios are somewhat reminiscent of Renaissance clocks, astrolobes and other scientific instruments, coupled with the visual allure of kaleidoscopes.
During this highly productive period of his life, Béjar also prepared designs for several European ceramics makers, including Spode, and designed stage sets. The artist held strong opinions about all manner of social and environmental concerns, and shared them via a weekly column in the 1980s in Mexico City daily El Universal.
Francisco Béjar, one of the more remarkable self-taught artists to emerge in Mexico during the second half of the twentieth century, died in Mexico City on 1 February 2007. His work continues to be highly sought after by collectors.
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Justino Fernández. (multiple years) Catálogos de las Exposiciones de Arte, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
One of the modern myths of Lakeside is that long term American resident and benefactor Neill James, author of Dust on my Heart, was the originator of the phrase “When once the dust of Mexico has settled upon your heart, you cannot then find peace in any other land.”
Dust on my Heart, published in 1946, was James’ final book, the only published work she wrote in Ajijic, and the only one of her books to include descriptions of life in the village. However, you only have to read the first page of the book to realize that James never claimed any credit for the “dust of Mexico” quote; she fully acknowledged that it was an existing saying and not an original line. What James actually wrote on the first page of Dust on my Heart was:
There is a saying, ‘When once the dust of Mexico has settled upon your heart, you cannot then find peace in any other land.’”
In several modern accounts, this has been modified to:
Neill James wrote, “Once the dust of Mexico settles on your heart, you can never go home again.””
In the years since James, several other authors utilized versions of the same saying. The most famous of these authors is Malcolm Lowry, who writes in Under the Volcano, that “He upon whose heart the dust of Mexico has lain, will find no peace in any other land.”
In recent years, Carolena Torres chose Dust on Their Hearts as the title of her debut novel, which is partially set at Lake Chapala. She paraphrases the original proverb as, “When the dust of Mexico falls upon your heart, you will never be the same.”
How or where did Neill James first encounter the proverb? Immediately prior to her arrival in Ajijic in 1943, James had spent several months in and out of a Mexico City hospital following a climbing accident and a volcanic eruption. It is entirely possible that it was in the hospital or shortly afterwards, during her convalescence in the spa town of Ixtapan de la Sal, that she read Dust of Mexico , a romance novel by Ruth Comfort Mitchell. Embedded in the story line of this novel, first published in 1941, is this version of the saying: “Once the dust of Mexico has settled on your heart, never can you rest in any other land.”
On first hearing it, the central character in Dust of Mexico—Priscilla Carpenter, a staid, single New York librarian—laughs at the idea. However, she changes her opinion after being taken on a trip to Mexico by a married, frivolous aunt, who promises Priscilla’s mother that there will be no men on the study tour of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women. But there are men, including a famous radio comedian and an ambitious American doctor, and in the process of choosing between several men, Priscilla “gains a knowledge of the romance and lure of Mexico.” Prior to publication as a novel, Dust of Mexico had been serialized in Women’s Home Companion.
Or perhaps James had read Anita Brenner? A decade earlier, renowned Mexican author and art critic Anita Brenner (1905-1974) quoted an almost identical version of the same proverb on the very first page of her Your Mexican Holiday: A Modern Guide, published in 1932: “Because there is a proverbial obsession expressed in a line which goes: ‘Once the dust of Mexico has settled on your heart, you have no rest in any other land.’ Mexico means something to you…” Three years earlier, Brenner had included this line on page 15 of Idols Behind Altars (1929): “But with the dust of Mexico upon it, that heart can find no rest in any other land.”
Within Mexico, it is common to see a translation of the “dust of Mexico” saying attributed directly to Brenner, failing to recognize that, like Neill James, she was not claiming any credit for the saying, merely quoting it. Several institutions and newspapers that should know better have done this, including Mexico’s National Museum of Art and Mexico City’s El Universal, and Nexus.
And there are earlier users in print of the saying than Brenner. For instance, in 1923, reporter, artist and screenwriter Wallace Smith used an extremely similar version in The little tigress; tales out of the dust of Mexico, a collection of stories set during the Revolution. He opened the chapter titled “Dust of Mexico” as follows:
“Once the dust of Mexico has settled on your heart there can be no rest for you in any other land. That is a saying in Mexico. It is spoken proudly and sometimes hopelessly. The truth of it is in the empty, seeking eyes of exiles in other countries- in places far away from the land of golden lights and purple shadows.” Smith was a talented cartoonist and “these tales of love, treachery, courage, and adventure are illustrated by the author’s atmospheric drawings from his field sketchbook.”
He, too, makes it clear that it is an old saying, not his original creation.
If you can add other early instances of the use of versions of the “Dust on my Heart” saying in mainstream works, please get in touch!
– See comments for details of a 1935 version of the saying in Vultures in the Sky by Todd Downing.
Anita Brenner. 1932. Your Mexican Holiday: A Modern Guide.
Anita Brenner. 1929. Idols Behind Altars.
Wallace Smith. 1923. The little tigress; tales out of the dust of Mexico.
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Despite several popular art sites listing Bert Pumphrey’s exhibitions as including three in Ajijic, I have yet to find any details for them. Pumphrey’s distinctive work is so highly collectible, that he would certainly deserve a place among the Lakeside greats (and in the Ajijic Museum of Art) if his association with Lake Chapala can be proven.
The three exhibitions listed for Bert Pumphrey in Ajijic are:
La Nueva Posada, Art Shows in the Garden, 1955
Casa de la Cultura, Ajijic, Plaza Principal 1978
Galeria AXIXICC, Ajijic, 1985
The 1955 entry clearly cannot be correct. Either this was an exhibit in the (Old) Posada Ajijic, or the year is inaccurate and it should be 1995. Either way, I have found no confirming evidence anywhere for this or the other two shows. If you can help, please get in touch!
Despite drawing a blank as regards the Ajijic exhibitions, my search for answers has enabled me to compile a more accurate account of Pumphrey’s life and work than those currently available on the web.
Bert Pumphrey. Undated. Un militar.
Bertrem (Bert) Pumphrey was born in Welby, Salt Lake City, Utah, on 30 January 1916. After graduating from Provo High School in 1936, Pumphrey took classes for a year at the Chicago Art Institute. From 1937 to 1941, he studied on a scholarship at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he was strongly influenced by Henry Lee McFee and Tom Craig
At the second annual exhibit of Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity (organized by Los Angeles County Museum) in 1941, Pumphrey’s painting “Rainy Season” and a work by famous Japanese-American modernist Sueo Serisawa received honorable mentions for painting.
In 1940, while still a student, Pumphrey had registered for military service, and after completing his studies the following year he enlisted in the army. He served as a surgical technician in the Army Medical Corps in Asia and the Far East
His first major group show after the war was at the Los Angeles Art Association in 1946, in a collective exhibition titled “They Have Returned,” with one critic writing that “Bertram Pumphrey’s oils of India convey that land’s rich decoration and vegetation and the accompanying poverty.”
Later that year in September Pumphrey held his first solo show (of 47 oil paintings) at the prestigious Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
In 1947, Pumphrey had the first of at least two solo shows at the American Contemporary Gallery in Los Angeles. His 22 canvases were described by Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier as “rich in color and human interest.” Millier also recorded that Pumphrey had “recently worked” with Tom Craig on a large mural or murals at the San Antonio Hospital, Claremont, and had completed a large 40′ by 12′ mural commission in a private Hollywood home.
In 1947-1948 Pumphrey taught art part-time at the Art Barn School of Arts in Salt Lake City, giving himself ample time to develop his own art while still having a reliable income.
Bert Pumphrey. Undated. Hasidic Rabbis Dancing.
Pumphrey moved to Mexico in 1948, and exhibited relatively infrequently in the US after that date, though he retained links with California, giving classes and participating in group shows in Lafayette and Oakland in 1954. By this time he had married Isabel. The couple apparently kept homes in both Tlalpan, a suburb of Mexico City and in California, dividing their time between the two places. Isabel became a naturalized US citizen in 1984 on her 54th birthday.
In 1955, Pumphrey painted murals depicting typical scenes from Bavarian villages on the walls of Sam’s Hof Brau in the historic Kost building in Sacramento. Four years later, he completed a large mural for the Seagulll Motel in Salt Lake City, assisted by his twin brother, Joe, who was also an artist.
His first major solo show in Mexico was at the Galería Pemex in Mexico City in January 1960. It included 106 works, in a variety of media, from oils on masonite and linoleum to watercolors and ink drawings, and of varied subjects, demonstrating the artist’s impressive versatility.
Pumphrey’s smaller solo show the following year at the Mexican-Northamerican Cultural Institute in Mexico City featured 19 oils and 17 watercolors; it included a self portrait alongside animal, coastal and jungle studies.
Pumphrey’s techniques and preferences changed markedly over the years. In 1971, the Oakland Museum showed a short film “Bert Pumphrey, Pleasanton Artist,” which depicted how Pumphrey liked to paint: using palette knives, including some of his own design, to cut through successive layers of paint to achieve the color, texture and form he wanted. (This technique was similar to that used for traditional lacquer work in Mexico). For these paintings, Pumphrey worked on masonite, rather than canvas, and on a table, rather than an easel.
Bert Pumphrey. 1969.
Pumphrey completed murals for several public buildings, clubs, churches and private homes in Mexico (presumably mainly in 1950s), as well as murals in the Kost building, Sacramento (1955) and the Seagull Motel, Salt Lake City (1959).
Bert Pumphreys’s confirmed group shows include Los Angeles Art Association (1946, 1947); Chaffey, Ontario, California (1947); Biblioteca Cervantes, Mexico City (1952); Artists’ Market, Oakland, California (1954) and Valley Art Center, Contra Costa, California (1955).
In addition to the three possible shows in Ajijic and one (also unconfirmed) in the Virgin Islands, Pumphrey’s solo shows included Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco (1946); American Contemporary Gallery, Los Angeles (1947, 1948); Palette Club, Salt Lake City (1947); Galería Pemex, Mexico City (1960); lnstituto Mexicano-Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales, Mexico City (1961); Little Gallery, Philadelphia (1967); Cory Gallery, San Francisco (1969); and La Cienega Gallery, Los Angeles (1971).
The artist spent his final years in South Pasadena, where he died on 20 June 2002.
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Contra Costa Gazette 11 Feb 1954, 5; 22 Jul 1955, 4
Contra Costa Times 25 Feb 1954, 5
Daily Herald 08 May 1936, 3
Justino Fernández. (a) 1953 (b) 1961 (c) 1962. Catálogos de las Exposiciones de Arte en los años 1952, 1960 and 1961. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.
Los Angeles Times 16 March 1941, 21; 16 March 1941, 21; 23 Mar 1941; 24 March 1946, 26; 6 Jul 1947, 26; 21 Sep 1947, 28; 04 Jul 1948, 45; 25 Jul 1971, 425
Oakland Tribune 14 Feb 1954, 91; 31 Jan 1971, 125
Pasadena Star-News. 2002. Bertrem Pumphrey (obituary). 29 June 2002.
Philadelphia Inquirer 04 Jun 1967, 141
Sacramento Bee 22 Jan 1955, 52
Salt Lake Tribune 02 Nov 1947, 64; 10 Aug 1947, 48; 14 Dec 1947, 72; 12 Jul 1959, 29; 18 Oct 1964, 78
San Francisco Examiner 29 Sep 1946, 135; 28 Dec 1969, 142
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
As explained in a previous post, my on-going fascination with the history of Lake Chapala was stimulated, in part, by the chance discovery many years ago of a copy of Antonio de Alba‘s 1954 book, Chapala.
Antonio de Alba. Chapala, p 115 (Click to enlarge)
The online claim (made only a few years ago) that Chapala is “the most accurate book to date about the local history” may have been true many decades ago, but has certainly not been true since the turn of this century.
The focus of my personal interest has been on when, how and why Chapala first became a center for international tourists. The ‘when’ is the easy part, given that the town’s first major hotel, the Hotel Arzapalo, opened its doors in 1898. The ‘how’ and ‘why’ are trickier to answer, and have led me down innumerable ‘rabbit holes’ related to the lives of early foreign settlers in Chapala.
What has emerged from years of research, and new online friendships with the descendants of many of these early settlers, is that the story of Lake Chapala is far more complex (and interesting) than I had ever imagined. Many of the details in de Alba’s account of the “principal promoters of tourism in Chapala” (page 115) need to be reconsidered, and in some cases rejected.
Please note that I am not, by publishing this critique, trying to disparage or discredit Antonio de Alba, his research or his book. On the contrary, it was his book that got me started down this road! But, like all accounts of history, over time new facts come to light, alternative interpretations are proposed—some of which become accepted—and a new, revised (and hopefully more accurate) version of the story is developed.
Let’s take a close look at de Alba’s account of the principal promoters of tourism in Chapala. It did not take me long to realize that ‘Séptimo Crow’ was Septimus Crowe (with an ‘e’ at the end), who was, as de Alba stated, of English origin, though he was actually born in northern Norway, where his father had a massive copper mine. It took me a lot longer to realize that the “Mr. Leonel Garden,” who built Villa Tlalocan, was Mr (later Sir) Lionel Carden (with a ‘C’), and even longer before I identified ‘Sr. D. Carlos Eissman” as Karl (Carlos) Eisenmann. Once I had their real names, it was relatively easy to find out a lot more about these individuals and their lives, and their connections to Chapala.
It turned out that Septimus Crowe, for example, had abandoned his wife and young son in Europe when he moved to Mexico. His son was informed that his father had died, and never lived to learn the truth; members of the succeeding generation were totally astonished to find a brief reference in one of my articles about Septimus’ life in Mexico.
De Alba writes that Crowe arrived in about 1895. While I can’t prove precisely when the eccentric Mr Crowe first came to Chapala, it was certainly several years earlier than that, as I have pointed out repeatedly over the past two decades. This is known because there is a clear reference to Crowe by Mexican diplomat-author Eduardo A. Gibbon in a book published in 1893. Gibbon’s account refers both to Crowe having built a “very lovely estate that can be seen from the lake on a hill, a quarter of a league from the village of Chapala” (now the site of Hotel Montecarlo) and to Crowe having “stimulated others to build holiday homes and with them give life and civilization to this very beautiful region.”
In the past several years, as I delved ever deeper into the lives of Crowe and others, I have been able to prove that Crowe built all the three houses mentioned by de Alba (Villa Montecarlo, Villa Bell, Villa Josefina), though not in the order he suggested. Before he built Villa Bell, Crowe had built Casa Albión, renamed Villa Josefina after it was bought by American-born beer magnate Joseph Maximilian Schnaider.
In the case of Villa Tlalocan, de Alba is correct that the house was built in about 1896: construction began in 1895 and the Cardens were able to move in the following year, in time to invite President Díaz for breakfast one morning in early November. De Alba is also correct that Carden sold Villa Tlalocan to Carlos Eisenmann. However, de Alba’s claims that the house was then bought by Manuel Cuesta Gallardo ‘after Eisenmann’s death’, and that the new owner built a home there intended as a gift for President Díaz, which the President never received because the Mexican Revolution broke out (1910), are inaccurate.
First, I have never found any contemporary newspaper accounts supporting the idea that Manuel Cuesta Gallardo built any home intended for President Díaz. There are, though, several references to a home being prepared for the President by his inlaws at El Manglar. Secondly, Eisenmann died in 1920 (in Germany), three years after Manuel Cuesta Gallardo had already transferred the title of Villa Tlalocan to a younger sister.
I repeat—for those who have read this far—that none of this post is intended in any way to disparage Antonio de Alba, his research or his book. It was my chance find of Chapala back in the 1980s that led me to become so passionate about exploring the history of how the small fishing village of Chapala became such an important international tourist destination.
Reading the book
Copies of Chapala, which has never been reprinted, are difficult to find. Fortunately for readers, Javier Raygoza Munguía, the publisher of the weekly PÁGINA Que sí se lee! has uploaded the entire text as a series of digital files which can be accessed via the link.
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Antonio de Alba. 1954. Chapala. Guadalajara: Banco Industrial de Jalisco.
Eduardo A Gibbon. 1893. Guadalajara, (La Florencia Mexicana). El salto de Juanacatlán y El Mar Chapálico. 1992 reprint Guadalajara: Presidencia Municipal de Guadalajara.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Japanese artist Masaharu Shimada, who specializes in sumi-e pen and ink drawings and has held dozens of acclaimed exhibitions in Mexico and his native Japan, lived for several months each year in San Antonio Tlayacapan from 1986 onwards. His exquisite works include numerous evocative monochrome impressionist landscapes of Ajijic and San Antonio Tlayacapan.
Sumi-e, which means black ink painting, developed over several centuries in Japan, after Zen Buddhist monks from China first introduced their deceptively simple techniques and style back in the fourteenth century. Chinese ink is applied to paper using brushes traditionally made of hair, bamboo or feathers.
Born in Nakagyo, Kyoto, in 1931, Shimada graduated from the calligraphy department of Tokyo Gakugei University in 1953 before teaching himself the techniques of sumi-e. He held his first solo show of sumi-e at the Chuokoron-sha Gallery, Tokyo, in 1961.
Masaharu Shimada. 2000. Cerro y lago de Chulavista.
In 1967, he visited Mexico for the first time and stayed six months. Two years later, he produced his first book, México en Sumi-e, published by Mokuji-sha, Tokyo.
He returned to Mexico in 1970 and held a solo show at the University of Guanajuato. In 1972, during his third visit to Mexico, he had a one-person show in Valle de Bravo, in the State of México.
Over the next decade, he revisited Mexico almost every year, before deciding in 1986 to establish a seasonal home in San Antonio Tlayacapan on Lake Chapala.
Masaharu Shimada. 1999. Casa antigua de San Antonio Tlayacapan.
During the course of his long love affair with Mexico, Shimada has produced several more books, including México Pintado en Tinta China and Colección de Pinturas en San Antonio (both published by Editorial Work House, Tokyo) and México Pintado en Tinta China, published in 2003 by Editorial Artes Gráficas Panorama S.A. de C.V. in Mexico City.
Shimada’s major solo exhibitions in Mexico include: University of Guanajuato (1970); Valle de Bravo (1972); Museo Alhondiga de Granaditas, Guanajuato (1978); Galería Arvil, Mexico City (1977, 1979); Casa de Cultura, Guadalajara (1988); Instituto Cabañas, Guadalajara (1989); Museo Pueblo de Guanajuato (1980, 1983, 1988, 1995); Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora (1996); Televisa, Guadalajara (1998); Nikkei Cultural Center, Mexico City (1999); Museo Casa de Arte Olga Costa-José Chávez Morado, Guanajuato (2001); Yakult Cultural Center, Guadalajara (1994, 2002); and Galería Ramón Alva de la Canal, Xalapa, Veracruz (2016).
The 48 sumi-e works Shimada displayed at the last named show included Lago y casa de San Antonio Tlayacapan, Chapala, Jalisco (1995); Fantasía de árbol de nopal (1996); Nopales (1997); and Panorámica de Guanajuato (2000).
The catalog of images from this exhibition can be viewed on issuu.com.
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
By the 1970s the Ajijic retirement community was sufficiently established that it attracted academic attention. The earliest study, never formally published, was by Dr Edwin G Flittie, a professor of sociology at the University of Wyoming. Flittie visited in 1973 and subsequently presented copies of “Retirement in the Sun,” his analysis of the retirement community, to the Lake Chapala Society Library. Like several later studies of foreign migrants, Flittie considered the Chapala-Ajijic region as a single unit, and not as two communities with their distinct histories as regards tourism and retirement. Flittie interviewed more than 100 retirees and found that many had failed to appreciate the substantial cultural differences between the US and Mexico, or recognized that the emphasis for many local residents was “not on material gain but rather on the attainment of a satisfying existence traditionally based upon agrarian economic self-sufficiency.”
Flittie estimated that about 60% of retirees were aged 60 to 74, and 14% were 75 or older. Very few were fluent in Spanish and 88% reported that their social life centered on fellow expatriates and other English-speaking individuals. Flittie found that most retirees lived much as they would have lived in the US. The main problems they faced were related to excessive drinking, marital and family discord (men adapted better than women), boredom, bribery, interactions with the local community, domestic help and old age. Flittie returned briefly in December 1977 to research the impacts of the massive 1976 devaluation of the peso from 12.5 pesos to a dollar to about 22.5 pesos to a dollar.
Juan José Medeles Romero, in his 1975 thesis proposing an urban development plan for Ajijic, detailed how the village had approximately tripled in size between 1900 and 1950, and then doubled in size the following decade. And this was even before the addition of numerous subdivisions such as Rancho del Oro and La Floresta. Curiously, Medeles ignored the impacts of foreigners and only mentioned them in passing.
A few years later, Mexican sociologist Francisco Talavera Salgado focused solely on Ajijic when, in Lago Chapala, turismo residencial y campesinado, he examined the varied impacts of foreign residents on the local community. His important findings are described in detail in several chapters of Foreign Footprints.
At the end of the 1970s anthropologist Eleanore Moran Stokes also homed in on Ajijic. She divided the evolution of the village after ‘Discovery’ into three phases: Founder (1940s to mid 1950s), Expansionary (mid 1950s to mid 1970s) and Established Colony (mid 1970s through the 1980s).
Several of her informants considered the representation of Ajijic in the Dane Chandos novels (Founder phase) to be non-fiction; to Stokes, this was “the local equivalent to a creation myth.” The nature of migrants changed in each stage. During the Founder phase, Ajijic served, in her view, largely as an artists’ colony. These “young single well-traveled” artists were resourceful and independent individuals who had little impact on the village beyond the employment of domestic help; most of them learned the language, liked the cuisine, and blended into the local community.
Later (Expansionary phase) arrivals tended to be members of the affluent and retired middle class, many of whom had traveled widely, either in the military or working for international corporations. These newer arrivals did materially change the village. By infusing cash into the local economy and starting businesses they created “a new wage labor class in the village.” By upgrading village homes they distinguished their residences from those of local families. By retaining their language, food and lifestyle preferences, these incomers established a social distance from their host community, even forming “privileged associations for recreation, friendship and religion.” In essence, many of these migrants wanted to make many aspects of life in Ajijic more like the US.
Such tendencies continued into the Established Colony phase. Vacant houses became increasingly scarce and agricultural land was parceled for vacation and retirement homes. The foreign community greatly boosted philanthropic activities, especially those helping children, though this stage also saw a marked social stratification develop within the foreign community.
Stokes estimated that foreigners occupied about 300 of the 950 houses in the village in 1979, but comprised less than 8% of the population. Like Talavera, she viewed retirees as agents of change, not merely spectators of ongoing social processes, though they felt a sense of powerlessness in regards to what they saw as deficiencies in the provision of such services as water, electricity, telephone, garbage collection and police.
Sociologist Charlotte Wolf, who moved to Ajijic with husband Rene in the early 1990s, was interested in how individual retirees adapted and constructed a new life for themselves in Ajijic.
Among the conclusions in 1997 of Lorena Melton Young Otero, who looked specifically at US retirees, was that they created new jobs, donated to charities and hastened “modernization,” but that their presence was driving up the cost of living for local people. In a later paper, she examined in detail the mourning ritual and other customs in Ajijic following the death of a child (angelito).
The evolutionary framework developed by Stokes was used by geographer David Truly to examine how the type of migrant has changed over the years and to develop a matrix of retirement migration behavior. Like Stokes, Truly concluded in 2002 that newer visitors (including retirees), and unlike earlier migrants, had less desire to adapt to the local culture and were more keen on ‘importing a lifestyle’ to the area.
Stephen Banks, author of Kokio: A Novel Based on the Life of Neill James, conducted dozens of interviews to study the identity narratives of retirees while living in Ajijic in 2002-2003. All respondents depicted Mexicans, both generally and individually, as “happy, warm and friendly, polite and courteous, helpful and resourceful.” However, at the same time, many shared instances in which they thought Mexicans had been untrustworthy, inaccessible, lazy and incompetent. Banks concluded that the responses revealed:
a struggle to conserve cultural identities in the face of a resistant host culture that has been colonized…. The Lakeside economy is dominated by expatriate consumer demand; indigenous commerce in fishing has disappeared as new employment opportunities opened up in the services sector; local prices for real estate (routinely listed in US dollars), restaurant dining, hotel lodging and most consumer goods are higher than in comparable non-retirement areas; traditional Mexican community life centered around the family has been supplemented, and in some cases supplanted, by expatriate community life centered around public assistance and volunteer programs… and the uniform use of Spanish in public life is displaced by the use of English.”
Lucía González Terreros is the lead author of two recent papers that explore the complexity of defining residential tourism and how alternative definitions relate to property rights, transaction costs and common goods. The research arose from her personal concerns about the rapid increase in the number of foreigners in Ajijic since 1990.
Equally interesting is the work of Francisco Díaz Copado, who looked at how Ajijic is being shaped by both local and foreign “rituals,” such as the annual Fiesta of San Andrés and the Chili Cookoff respectively. In his 2013 report, Díaz Copado also examined “the different ways in which people describe and name the different zones of Ajijic… [which] reflect some historical conflicts.” Two annotated maps sharply contrast traditional locations and names with those used by retirees.
Marisa Raditsch investigated the impacts of international migrants settling in the municipality of Chapala “based on the perceptions of Mexican people in the receiving context.” This 2015 study found that these perceptions tended “to be favorable in terms of generating employment and contributing to the community; and unfavorable in terms of rising costs of living and some changes in local culture.”
Social anthropologist Vaira Avota, writing in 2016, also looked at the relations between foreigners and locals in Ajijic. She drew a sharp distinction between “traditional immigrants,” who wanted to truly understand Mexico’s culture, traditions,… [learn] Spanish and willingly participate in local activities,” and “new immigrants,” who wanted to live in a version of the US transplanted to Lake Chapala.
The impacts of this shift in migrant type were further explored by Mexican researcher Mariana Ceja Bojorge, who focused squarely on the relationships and interactions between local Ajijitecos and foreigners. She concluded in 2021 that the shift “endangers the acceptance of the presence of the other” and that “Although the presence of foreigners has generated economic well-being in the area, it has also been responsible for the reconfiguration of space, where locals have been forced to leave their territory.”
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Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Robert Clutton (1932-2016) lived in Ajijic from about 1959 to 1961. His time in Mexico introduced him to the pantheon of ancient Aztec and Maya gods which so strongly influenced much of his later art. He revisited Ajijic several times after this initial extended stay in the village.
“Bob” Clutton, “Roberto” to his Mexican friends, was born in England on 5 June 1932, brought up in Wales, and passed away in San Francisco on 15 August 2016 at the age of 84.
He left Wales in 1949 to cross the Atlantic on the Mauretania. (Until late in life he much preferred ocean liners to aircraft.) He settled in Baltimore where he became the Art Director for Black & Decker. In October 1955, he was one of numerous artists exhibiting in the The Artists’ Union of Baltimore annual show.
By 1959 Clutton was living and working in Ajijic on Lake Chapala. Several of his paintings from this time can be seen on this Facebook page of the San Francisco Senior Center. This painting of the Posada Ajijic in 1959 (below) is a fine example of Clutton’s style during his first months at Lake Chapala.
Robert Clutton. 1959. Untitled painting of Posada Ajijic. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist’s family
Former Ajijic gallery owner Katie Goodridge Ingram remembers Bob Clutton as a lovely man, who was well-liked by everyone in the community. During his time in Mexico, Clutton became increasingly fascinated by the “gods of ancient Mexico” and images of these gods became a frequent theme in his later paintings.
When he decided to leave Ajijic in 1961, he chose to move to San Francisco because that was where “all the interesting people he met in Mexico” were from. He continued to make his living as a professional artist in that city for more than fifty years. He retained some close ties to Mexican friends in Ajijic, and revisited the village several times.
Robert Clutton. 1959. Bullfight, Ajijic. (Image from San Francisco Senior Center page)
A newspaper feature in 1968, entitled “Art by the Foot” described how Clutton, “a bronzed, bearded, no-nonsense British artist” was making “made-to-measure bas-reliefs” in his Divisadero Street studio. The bas-reliefs, “designed to be decorative indoors and architectural assets outdoors”, used Aztec symbols and colors, and relied on the interplay of sun and shade to emphasize the materials, relief and texture.
Clutton was still producing “formal paintings” which also showed the influence of Mexico, and was represented by the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco. A solo show of his oils and acrylics at that gallery in 1969 brought a wider audience for his work. Shortly after Clutton petitioned for US citizenship in 1971, the Vorpal Gallery also included examples of his work in its 1971 Christmas Show, which also featured paintings by John Denning, Muldoon Elder, Roy Glover, Stephen Haines Hall, Bruce Sherratt (who had previously lived for several years at Lake Chapala) and Gary Smith.
Clutton also exhibited in Los Angeles and in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where a show of his oil paintings opened at Galeria Uno (Morelos 561) in Puerto Vallarta on 23 March 1993.
Robert Clutton. ca 1969. Tezcatlipoca in front of his smoking mirror seeing himself as Huitzilapochtli. (Vorpal Gallery)
In 1988, Clutton designed the poster for the 1988 Haight Ashbury Street Fair. He enjoyed social events, garden parties and dinners and surrounded himself with creative people, making for lively and entertaining discussions. In his final years, Clutton was active as an artist at the San Francisco Senior Center.
This is an updated version of a profile first published 1 December 2016.
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
My sincere thanks to Jane Clutton for sharing memories of her husband, and for graciously permitting me to share images of paintings belonging to his family.
Sources
Jane Clutton; personal communication, October 2016.
Peninsula Times Tribune, 1 Jan 1972, 42.
San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, California Living, Week of March 31, 1968: “Art by the Foot” [copy supplied by Jane Clutton]
San Francisco Chronicle. 2016. Robert Clutton – obituary, San Francisco Chronicle from Oct. 2 to Oct. 7, 2016.
Vorpal Galleries. Robert Clutton. 1969. San Francisco: Vorpal Galleries.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Among the chance events back in the 1980s that stimulated my curiosity about the history of Chapala was finding a book titled Chapala in a used bookstore in Ajijic. While the bookstore lasted only a few months, Chapala has been in a pride of place on my book shelves ever since.
Written by Antonio de Alba, Chapala was published by the Banco Industrial de Jalisco in 1954 in an edition of 2000 copies. The 177-page book was published as de Alba was nearing the end of more than two decades of service as parish priest of Chapala.
Chapala is an impressive achievement for its time, and the earliest book to be devoted to a single town or village at Lake Chapala. The first book-length histories of other settlements—including Ocotlán, Jocotepec, Ajijic, Tizapán el Alto and La Palma—all came many years later.
Antonio Guadalupe de Alba was born on 12 December (Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe) 1900 in San Juan de los Lagos. Antonio was several months shy of his third birthday when he lost his father, Jesús Alba Alba (1856-1903), and was raised by his mother, Lucía Rodríguez Murguía de Alba (born in 1859), who died in Chapala in 1946.
Antonio de Alba served as parish priest in Chapala from 1937 to 1954. His initial appointment was not without its critics; a group of parishioners wrote to the Archbishop supporting an alternative candidate. De Alba quickly demonstrated his ability to unite the faithful and gain their respect. Shortly after arriving in Chapala (from Cocula), he helped lead the effort to build a chapel to Our Lady of Lourdes (Nuestra Señora de Lourdes) on the hillside above the Villa Montecarlo. The first stone of this chapel was laid on 18 March 1940 and the dedication service was held on 14 August 1941.
Throughout his time in Chapala, de Alba was held in high regard by his parishioners. In April 1954, de Alba was appointed Canon of the Collegiate Church of San Juan de los Lagos. He died in León, Guanajuato, on 25 December 1958.
De Alba explains in the preface to Chapala that his own interest in the town’s history had been prompted by meeting José Ramírez Flores, the author of an article titled “Chapala y su curato hasta el Siglo XVIII” in the first issue of Estudios Históricos (a Guadalajara-based magazine). In response to some queries from Ramírez, de Alba began to explore the parish archive for answers:
I discovered treasures of true greatness, hidden under the dust of the years and the carelessness of our Mexican character (which does not know how to judge the greatness of our heroes, and is not accustomed to recounting their feats).”
De Alba then devoted a lot of his time to finding and collating historical material. Though he openly acknowledges in his book that he was not a historian and did not write like a historian, he explains that he felt compelled to share “what I had discovered, which is unknown to most people.”
He singled out the need to preserve the memory of clerics, such as Friar Miguel de Bolonia who lived his final years in Chapala, and of the “heroism of our aboriginal Indians, as well as the fine nobility of almost all the Spaniards who conquered these lands and stayed here”, as well as of the “many beautiful and very honorable events in our history, such as the great actions of our local insurgents and the defense of the Island of Mezcala.”
The early chapters of Chapala are based on excerpts from, and summaries of, the early accounts of the region written by Franciscan chroniclers such as friars Antonio Tello, Antonio de Ciudad Real and others, combined with the more formal syntheses written by historians of Jalisco.
De Alba acknowledges that the second part of the book, which focuses on the twentieth century history of the town, is “taken from tradition or personal knowledge.” Some of “the interesting and instructive news related to our town” that de Alba includes is based on the recollections of some older members of his parish. These recollections, which pertain to memories from half a century earlier, are neither comprehensive in coverage nor, with the benefit of hindsight, entirely accurate.
I am quite certain, after reading and rereading de Alba, that he never intended Chapala to be the final word on the town’s history. He acknowledged its limitations but wanted to share the findings of his research, not compile a formal, comprehensive, historical account.
It is unfortunate, therefore, that so many later writers have relied almost exclusively on de Alba’s writing. Tracing the origins of what I’ve come to call the “modern myths” of Chapala’s history—such as President Díaz spending Holy Week there every year from 1904 to 1909—has led me time and time again back to Chapala. The claim about President Díaz, for example, stems from a single sentence (page 117) which we now know is not supported by contemporaneous documents.
In a separate post – How history progresses: Antonio de Alba and “Chapala” – I clarify and correct statements made on one particular page of Chapala, in the hope that this will offer some small but significant steps towards a revised history of the town.
For its time, Antonio de Alba’s book is a true tour-de-force, and an invaluable source and inspiration for later authors, including myself. I have the highest esteem for both Antonio de Alba and Chapala. However, this does not mean that everything he wrote should be accepted uncritically and without comment or, where possible, correction. And I am hopeful that this is precisely what future authors and researchers will do in relation to my own work.
Reading the book
Chapala has never been reprinted, and copies are difficult to find. Fortunately for readers, Javier Raygoza Munguía, the publisher of the weekly PÁGINA Que sí se lee! has uploaded the entire text as a series of digital files (access via link).
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Antonio de Alba. 1954. Chapala. Guadalajara: Banco Industrial de Jalisco.
Peter Bello, personal communications via FB, November 2022.
Luis Enrique Orozco. 1958. Nuestra Señora de Lourdes de Chapala. Reseña histórica ordenada por el Sr. Cura D. Raúl Navarro… Guadalajara.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Artist and international art educator Bruce Robert Sherratt and his first wife, Lesley Jervis, a British sculptor, lived in Jocotepec at the western end of Lake Chapala from 1968 to 1970. Prior to their arrival in Mexico, they had lived and traveled for some time in the USA.
Bruce Robert Sherratt was born in Biddulph, Derbyshire on 31 May 1944. Both Sherratt and his wife studied at the Newcastle School of Art in Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire, before moving to London where they married in 1963, and where Sherratt gained his degree in drawing and painting from the Camberwell College of Arts. Many years later, as a mature student, he also completed a degree in Art Education from the University of Wales in Cardiff, U.K.
Sherratt has written of fulfilling a youthful ambition by traveling (with his wife) to Mexico, where he gradually established his own identity as a surrealist painter, “hypnotized by the Aztec, Mayan and Toltec mythology” and “drawn to the giants of Mexican revolutionary muralism such as Orozco, Rivera, Tamayo and Siquieros.”
After reaching Jocotepec, the young couple rented a huge house called “El Kiosko”, “with spectacular views of the entire lake”, set up their studio, and got to work. Sherratt describes them as “hermits”, obsessed by their work: “We were very serious, determined to develop our work and we were very ambitious.” They had relatively little connection to the Lakeside art scene of the time, though they did frequent Ramón’s bar on the plaza and got to know Jocotepec artists (Don) Shaw and John Frost.
During his time in Mexico, Sherratt held several exhibitions of his work , including a solo show at the Galería Municipal in Guadalajara in 1969.
Bruce Sherratt. 1970. Silent Cataclysm (oil on canvas). Credit: Bruce Sherratt Gallery.
In June 1970, Bruce Sherratt’s work was in a group exhibit in Guadalajara at the Casa de la Cultura Jalisciense. Other artists participating in this show, included Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John Frost, Mario Aluta, Daphne Aluta, Chester Vincent, Lesley Jervis Maddock (aka Lesley Sherratt), Gustave Aranguren, Hector Navarro, and Willi Hartung. According to the Guadalajara Reporter, the three works by Sherratt, titled “Victims,” showed “imaginative fluidity,”
Bruce Sherratt – 1971 exhibit
The following month (July 1970) the Anglo Mexican Institute in Mexico City held a joint show of Sherratt’s paintings and sculptures by ‘Madock’ (the art name used by Lesley, his wife). This show in Mexico City was apparently at the encouragement of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington.
After his time in Jocotepec, Sherratt traveled to California, where he painted for a year in San Francisco. His work was exhibited in a group show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1970) and in an exhibit entitled “Surrealist Painters in San Francisco”, in the Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco (also 1970).
The following year, he had another exhibit of oils and drawings in Guadalajara, in the Galeria Municipal. In his review for El Informador, John Frost called it “a passionate description of a trip to another world”, writing that Sherratt, “guides us through regions that could alarm and depress us if it was not for his vision and artistic discipline”. El Informador‘s regular art columnist, J. Luis Meza Ina, however, viewed the show as the work of a painter, not an artist.
At the end of 1971, Sherratt’s work was included in the San Francisco Vorpal Gallery Christmas Show, alongside works by Robert Clutton (who had also lived for several years at Lake Chapala), John Denning, Muldoon Elder, Roy Glover, Stephen Haines Hall, and Gary Smith.
After his time in San Francisco, Sherratt decided to travel the world and spent several years meandering through Latin America. He became sufficiently interested in the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, and color theory, to return to the UK to take a degree in Art Education, before becoming a respected international art educator, whose teaching career has taken him to international schools in Germany, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Sherratt’s studio is currently in Ubud on the island of Bali in Indonesia, where he is the founder and CEO of the Bali Center for Artistic Creativity (BCAC). The powerful and colorful images on his website show there are few limits to his imagination and artistic abilities. In the past twenty years or so, he has exhibited in numerous countries, including several shows in Jakarta, Indonesia: a retrospective at the Duta Fine Arts Foundation (1998), a show entitled “Synthesis and Abstraction” at the British Council (2001) and an exhibition at the ExpatriArt Gallery (2005).
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Sincere thanks to Bruce Sherratt for sharing, via email, some of his memories from his time in Mexico. To see more of his work, please visit his website.
This is a revised version of a profile first published 25 June 2015.
Sources
El Informador, 5 June 1970; 10 May 1971; 16 May 1971.
Evening Sentinel (Stoke on Trent), 21 Sep 1963, 8.
Guadalajara Reporter, 21 Mar 1970; 13 June 1970.
The Peninsula Times Tribune, 1 Jan 1972, 42.
Justino Fernández. 1971. Catálogo de las Exposiciones de Arte en el año 1970. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Inveterate world traveler Norman D Ford (1921-2009) described Lake Chapala and Ajijic in several of his books, including in Bargain Paradises of the World (1952). By 1970, he had decided that Lake Chapala was “no longer the cheapest place in Mexico. Since 1950, about 1,500 American couples have moved into its two dreamy villages of Chapala and Ajijic. Prices have inevitably risen. But building costs still average only $4 per square foot, and you can hire a maid for $12 or a cook for $16 a month.”
“You can have a modern home built for under $5,000…. For two, you can budget about $70 for food and $30 for utilities and your maid per month. The rest is for high living–golf, riding or swimming by day, followed by some of the most fabulous parties on this continent.”
Ford was born in the UK on 8 January 1921, the only child of Frederick William John Matthew and Jessie Shortland Ford. He grew up in Wales, and became a lifelong adventurer, especially keen on cycling, hiking and kayaking. During six years service as a radio operator in the Merchant Navy during the second world war, Ford traveled as far as the U.S., Sri Lanka and New Zealand.
A few days after the war ended, Ford declared himself president of the Globetrotters Club, a then loose-knit organization which produced “a monthly newsletter describing how to travel the world at rock bottom cost, plus a list of other members.” This helped popularize low budget adventure travel to all manner of unlikely destinations.
In early 1947 he moved permanently to the US where he worked as an editor and began to write travel and retirement books, starting with Where to Retire on a Small Income (1950). The success of this book, and several later books, enabled Ford to quit his day job, move to Florida, and focus on freelance writing. By 1980 travel writing had become increasingly competitive, so Ford moved to Boulder, Colorado, and switched to writing popular books about health issues. He spent the last years of his life in Kerville, Texas, where he died on 19 June 2009 at the age of 88.
Ford wrote a more detailed account of Ajijic in Fabulous Mexico where everything costs less. The following excerpts are from the 10th edition (1970).
AJIJIC. Alt 5,030′, pop 3,500. An ancient Tarascan fishing village, Ajijic nestles on the lush shores of Lake Chapala beneath a steep, green and aesthetically contoured mountain range…. You notice the neat, trim plaza with its well painted bandstand, the picturesque fishing nets strung along the shore. What lies behind those bare adobe walls? Inside are white patios lush with flowers, well equipped art studios and the comfortable homes and apartments of Ajijic’s 300 permanent American residents.”
Ford summarizes how foreigners ‘discovered’ Ajijic and began to change it:
Years ago, a retired British engineer seeking a Utopia discovered this garden spot and built himself an impressive lakeshore home fronted by an acre of color-splashed blooms. After World War II, veterans studying in Guadalajara found they could live well here on their G.I. Bill payments. Artists moved in, led by several well known modern painters. Several writers and musicians followed together with a group of enterprising ladies who reorganized Ajijic’s dwindling handlooms crafts into a thriving industry. With a few exceptions, this group still forms Ajijic’s Old Guard. Getting in early, they bought up the choicest lots and homes, secured long term leases on the lowest rentals and today, most of these old timers offer outstanding examples of the way in which the good life can be enjoyed in Mexico on little.”
Ford explains that while some of these incomers were still paying “fantastically low rents” [$7.50 to $15.00 a month] “and living well on very small budgets,” some were “constructing lavish homes costing up to $14,000 and $15,000. New homes are sprouting all around the village and to the west, ultra modern homes are studding a new hillside subdivision.”
He concluded that “Ajijic today is a slightly raffish, slightly bohemian rustic village where retirees outnumber the artists five to one.” The foreign community was changing: “Ajijic is still no place for suburban conformists but neither is its nonconformity disquieting. Drinks and gossip are still favorite pastimes but criticism today centers on the unstable electricity, the water supply which sometimes runs dry in May, and the water hyacinths which clog the lake rather than on eccentric people.”
Besides writing about Mexico, Ford wrote dozens of other books, including Florida: A Complete Guide to Finding What You Seek in Florida (1953); How to travel without being rich (1955); America’s 50 best cities in which to live, work, and retire (1956); America by car : planned routings to all that’s worth seeing (1957); Where to retire on a small income (1966); Good night : the easy and natural way to sleep the whole night through (1983); Keep on pedaling : the complete guide to adult bicycling (1990); 50 Healthiest Places to Live & Retire in the United States (1991); The sleep Rx: 75 proven ways to get a good night’s sleep (1994); and Natural remedies: techniques for preventing headaches and the common cold (1994).
When Ford looked back on his varied experiences on several continents, including cycling trips in 38 countries, he concluded that:
travel half a century ago was much more rewarding and much more fun…. Overall, the world was much safer then with far less risk of being robbed or mugged. In fact, every year since 1945 I’ve witnessed a world-wide deterioration in the quality of life and the quality of the travel experience. Each year, more Coca-Cola signs appear and almost every country is rapidly losing its national character while it fuses into a faceless industrial monoculture.”
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Alice de Boton (1906-2010) started an art school in California, painted in Ajijic in the early 1970s, and continued to paint regularly until well after celebrating her 100th birthday.
Born in Jaffa, Palestine, on 25 December 1906, de Boton painted from childhood. After her family moved to France, she took painting classes in Paris and gained a law degree, as well as a certificate in chemistry.
In 1939 she married Jean Robert Bernard, a French biochemist. When the second world began, the couple fled Paris for the relative safety of southern France.
Alice de Boton. River Course (EBay).
The disruptions of the second world war ended the family’s ambitions for a secure life in France. In the turmoil of the war, Alice, who spoke five languages-English, Spanish, French, Italian and Hebrew—also picked up a smattering of German. Very near the end of the war, she and her husband found themselves having to care for her young niece, Aline, whose father (Alice’s brother, Yves) had been captured and killed while participating in the French resistance. Alice and Robert later formally adopted Aline, and the blended family left Europe in 1947 for a new beginning in the U.S.
Alice de Boton. Guitar Player. (EBay).
They boarded a liberty boat in Antwerp, Belgium, on 29 May 1947 and landed in Houston on 14 June. Mistakenly, the ship’s passenger manifest listed Aline, then 9 years old, as the “granddaughter” of Alice Bernard (chemist, aged 40) and Jean Robert Bernard (44-year-old biologist). They settled in San Francisco, where they had friends. Robert found employment as a biochemist and Alice pursued her interest in art, teaching and painting. In 1953, Alice began the Peninsula Arts and Crafts school in San Mateo, California, staffed by a number of noteworthy Bay Area artists. She sold the school four years later in order to move to Berkeley and open her own gallery.
After Robert retired in 1969, he and Alice lived for several years in Ajijic. Robert (1903-1993) took up carving and sculpture, a decision which had unusual consequences for Ajijic native Fernando García, who worked for him. After watching his employer at work, García expressed an interest in learning how to carve. He then worked by candlelight late into the night for several weeks to complete several “small primitives of extraordinary beauty and sensitivity.” When shown at the grand 1971 Fiesta de Arte, held at the home of art patrons Frances and Ned Windham, all of García’s sculptures sold within minutes.
Alice de Boton. Portrait of Gloria Marthai, a longtime resident at Lake Chapala. Coll: Sunny Russell.
Within months of moving to Ajijic, Alice had three of her works—two oils and an acrylic—selected by a four-person jury for inclusion in the Semana Cultural Americana (American Artists’ Exhibit) at the Instituto Cultural Mexicano Norteamericano de Jalisco, A.C. in Guadalajara. The exhibit was comprised of more than 70 works in total by 42 US artists (working in Guadalajara, San Miguel de Allende and at Lake Chapala) and opened on 27 June 1969.
A list of Lake Chapala artists in 1971 gave Alice de Boton’s address as Aquiles Serdán #1, Ajijic. The following year, she held a solo show at the Museo de Historia (now the Centro Cultural Patio de Los Ángeles) at Cuitlauhuac 305 in Guadalajara. Her “social commentaries” and abstracts in oils, acrylics, collages and assemblages, were praised for their “imagination, originality and artistic skill.”
In February 1973, Alice held an exhibit of “recent paintings” and tapestries at the Hotel Camino Real (now Hotel Real de Chapala) in Ajijic. Allyn Hunt considered that the artists was “at her very best in this show when executing scenes with a pallet knife, casting a deep mosaic of blade strokes to form a face of a figure.”
Robert and Alice de Boton sold their Ajijic home in 1974, and were about to move to the state of Guanajuato, when they changed their minds and opted to rent a residence-with-studio in Ajijic. The de Botons did leave Ajijic permanently not long after that, to live first in the Yucca Valley in Southern California, and then in Israel. They returned to the US in 1989 to live in Columbia, Missouri, close to their adopted daughter, Aline.
De Boton continued to paint and exhibit, and held several solo shows in Columbia. Even moving to a retirement home did little to reduce her artistic creativity or productivity, and the home devoted one entire third-floor wall to her paintings.
During her long and prolific career, Alice solo shows in several countries. Working in a variety of media, she utilized her specialist knowledge of chemistry to develop innovative techniques in encaustics, where a heated mixture of pigment and molten beeswax is applied to a suitable surface, such as prepared wood.
Alice de Boton’s works have found their way into many private collections in Mexico, the U.S. and Israel. Among her many awards was a Degree of Honor awarded by the Society of Western Artists.
Alice de Boton died in Columbia on 10 April 2010 at the age of 103.
Acknowledgment
My thanks to Sunny Russell for permission to use the photograph of Alice de Boton’s portrait of Gloria Marthai.
Guadalajara Reporter: 3 Apr 1971; 4 March 1972; 18 Mar 1972; 17 Feb 1973; 22 June 1974.
Mark Humpal. 2017. Ray Stanford Strong, West Coast Landscape Artist. University of Oklahoma Press. Note 25, p 190.
Pamela A. Mulumby. 2006. “Centenarian’s art doubles as visual diary.” Columbia Missourian, 24 December 2006.
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Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Philip Rosheger (1950-2013) began his musical career with childhood piano lessons before taking up the guitar in 1962. His progression as a guitarist was exceptionally rapid. By his mid-teens, he was taking master classes in Spain with José Tomás and the legendary Andrés Segovia, and his protégés, José Tomás and José Luis Rodrigo. He subsequently performed in the master classes given by Venezuelan virtuoso Alirio Diaz in Alessandria, Italy.
His guitar playing earned him many awards during his stay in Europe from 1966 to 1974, and he became the first American ever to win First Prize at the International Guitar Competition in Santiago de Compostela.
Philip Rosheger. Credit: unknown
At a lifetime of concerts and recitals in Spain, Canada and throughout the US, Rosheger displayed “his flawless technique, his tone of very best quality, his responsive personality and his exquisite sensitivity,” at venues such as Carnegie Recital Hall, Herbst Theater in San Francisco, and Bovard Auditorium at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Rosheger was on the faculty of San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1975 to 1978 and Sonoma State University in Northern California from 1979 to 1989. In addition to playing, he became an acclaimed composer who performed many of his original compositions in public.
Rosheger was visiting a former student, Jim Byers, in Chapala in 2008 when he composed “Clear Southern Sky,” which he dedicated to his host. “Clear Southern Sky” was first recorded by Eddie Lara on his disc titled “840″ and first performed in public in 2021 at the Centro Cultural González Gallo en Chapala.
Julio Garcia Casas, El Correo de Andalucia, Seville, Spain.
Program notes for a South Bay Guitar Society 1994 concert
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Her novel, provisionally titled Field of Old Blood (a Lorca quotation) was set in Mexico, and the award (an advance of $1500 against future royalties) enabled Osterhout to spend eighteen months in Mexico, divided between Mexico City and Ajijic, to complete the novel in 1946-47.
On their return to the US, Tomkins struggled to write a second novel, but did get several short stories published. To make ends meet, he became a journalist, working first for Radio Free Europe (1953-1957) and then Newsweek. He had a freelance contribution to the New Yorker accepted in 1958, and joined the magazine two years later as a staff writer. In addition to short stories and humor pieces, he branched out into nonfiction. Over two decades, he focused on chronicling the rapidly evolving New York City art scene. He was the New Yorker’s official art critic in the early 1980s, and responsible for hundreds of art reviews and profiles for the magazine’s “Art World” column.
