Renowned American painter, educator, designer and architect Millard Owen Sheets was born in Pomona, California, on 24 June 1907, and died in Anchor Bay, California, on 31 March 1989.
But, in summary, Sheets studied at the Chouinard Art Institute, where, even before graduating, he was exhibiting watercolors in the annual shows of the California Water Color Society and teaching watercolor techniques at Chouinard.
Millard Sheets. 1983. Lake Chapala, Mexico. Reproduced by kind permission of California Watercolor gallery.
He exhibited widely across the U.S. and Europe, and gained national recognition as a fine watercolorist. His life, work and painting style made the pages of Art Digest, Eyes on America and a book published by Dalzell Hatfield in Los Angeles in 1935.
During the second world war, Sheets was an artist-correspondent for Life magazine and served with the United States Army Air Forces in India and Burma.
As an art educator, Sheets worked at Chouinard Art Institute, Scripps College, and was Director of Otis Art Institute (1953-1960), fomenting the development of hundreds of young artists.
Millard Sheets. Chapala Church. (EBay photo)
Later in life he designed and executed dozens of major mosaic and mural projects. His commissions ranged from Los Angeles City Hall to Detroit Public Library, the Mayo Clinic, the mosaic dome and chapel at the National Shrine in Washington DC, and the Hilton Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Works by Sheets are in the permanent collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum (both in New York; the Chicago Art Institute; the National Gallery (Washington D.C.); the DeYoung Museum (San Francisco); and the Los Angeles County Museum.
Sheets made multiple visits to Chapala between 1947 (believed to be the first time he visited the lake) and the early 1980s.
Millard Sheets.1979. Noon, Chapala. Reproduced by kind permission of California Watercolor gallery.
Sheets’ 1947 trip to Chapala was in the company of long-time friend Merritt (‘Muggs’) Van Sant (1898-1964) and fellow artist, master woodworker and designer Sam Maloof (1916-2009), who was working for Sheets at the time and had learnt Spanish as a child from a Mexican-born housekeeper. Interviewed in 2002 by Mary MacNaughton for the Archives of American Art, Maloof recalled, albeit all too briefly, their trip to Chapala:
“… we flew to Guadalajara and I could have stayed for three years for what it cost us for three weeks. Of course it had to be the best hotel rooms and I had a room by myself. Millard and Muggs Van Zandt [Sant] had a room together and we had to rent a car. They had a brand new Buick with a driver that drove us all over and we’d all put money in the kitty every morning and Muggs would be the banker and we traveled from Lake Chapala to Morelia.”
Katie Goodridge Ingram (who first brought Millard Sheets’ link to Lake Chapala to my attention) remembered Sheets bringing an artist group to paint in Ajijic on at least one occasion.
Note: This is a work in progress. If you can offer any additional information about Millard Sheets’ visits to Lake Chapala, please get in touch!
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.
Mary MacNaughton. 2002. Interview of Sam Maloof conducted January 2002 by Mary MacNaughton, for the Archives of American Art, in Maloof’s home/studio in Alta Loma, California.
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.
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.
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.
Watercolorist and art educator Ben Shute enjoyed extended trips in Mexico on several occasions and visited Ajijic in 1951. Two watercolors from that visit are now in the permanent collections of art institutions in the US.
Benjamin Edgar Shute was born in Altoona, Wisconsin on 13 July 1905, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, where his teachers included Allen Philbrick and George Oberteuffer from 1922-1928. He left Chicago in 1928 to take a six-week teaching job at the newly established High Museum School of Art (later Atlanta Art Institute) in Atlanta, Georgia. This temporary assignment was the start of an entire career teaching art in Atlanta, and he lived there for the rest of his life. Shute was dean-director of the High Museum from 1948-1950, and dean of the Atlanta Art Institute from 1950-52. The school established a scholarship in Shute’s honor in 1984.
Shute’s first trip to Mexico, partly funded by a Carnegie Travel grant, was in 1948. He and his first wife, Nell Choate (Jones) Shute (also a talented artist) held a joint exhibit afterwards at the High Museum, Atlanta. The show, featuring 45 or so watercolors, was a great success. Doris Lockerman praised the artists for “retelling the tumultuous, violent and ancient story of Mexico through the vibrant strokes of their paintings made spontaneously and impulsively throughout a three-month vacation this Summer in Mexico.” Lockerman urged readers to visit the show and see for themselves how the two artists “have caught a headline history of current Mexico through which the thoughtful observer might begin to understand his neighbor south of the border.” The exhibit did not only show the bright side of Mexico: “The message of mismanagement and graft show in the muddy streets, cobblestone aqueducts, leaking roofs…”
The Shutes returned to Mexico for a month in 1950, driving to Guanajuato and Mexico City. The following year, Shute was on another Carnegie Travel grant when he and his wife visited Lake Chapala. Two watercolors from that visit are now in the Betty Plummer Woodruff Collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
Ben Shute. 1951. Ajiji. (sic)
The first painting is a watercolor and ink on paper titled “Ajiji” (sic) and dated 13 August 1951. Set against the church bell tower and dark mountains, a woman and an infant stand next to a village wall, with a dog to the right of them. The museum website lists a second watercolor titled “View of Lake Chapala,” though sadly it is neither on display in the museum nor does the website have any image of it.
Shute is best known for his portraits, still lifes and evocative landscapes, often using casein and ink on paper. He delighted in painting plein air, and enjoyed having his creative and painting process watched by kids, animals and onlookers. His work was included in numerous group shows, the most noteworthy of which were the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York. He was a co-founder in 1945 of the Southeastern Annual Art Exhibition (a juried competition with over 2000 entries from nine southern states) which he chaired until 1961.
Shute, who was a member of the Salmagundi Club in New York, died in Atlanta on 15 July 1986. A retrospective exhibition of his works, organized by the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, toured the state in 2002-2003.
Sources
The Atlanta Constitution, 1 Sep 1940, 37; 30 Jul 1948, 17; 14 Nov 1948, 52; 4 Aug 1950, 21.
Laufer, Marilyn. “Ben Shute.”New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified Aug 14, 2013.
Doris Lockerman. 1948. “Let’s See Now: The Shutes Painted an Idea.” The Atlanta Constitution, 8 Dec 1948, 18.
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.
A chance find in a New Mexico newspaper mentions that artist Arthur Merrill and his wife visited Phoenix, Arizona, in February 1952, with plans to continue on to Lake Chapala. Arthur (“Art”) Joseph Merrill (1885-1973) took up art later than most, but forged a successful career in commercial art and as a watercolorist.
Arthur Merrill. Painting. Credit: J Levine Auction, Scottsdale, 2016.
Merrill certainly completed watercolors of Guanajuato and other parts of Mexico. But, so far, no paintings have surfaced that are directly related to Lake Chapala.
Merrill was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 11 April 1885, and graduated as a registered pharmacist, before deciding to study chemistry and geology. It was during a tour of European galleries and museums that he became determined to pursue art as a career. In 1911 he completed a Bachelor of Arts and Science degree at McGill University in Montreal, and took early color photographs for the French government during a Canadian geological survey.
Arthur Merrill. Mexican Street Scene.
He took art classes with A. J. Musgrove of Winnipeg and Franz Johnston of Toronto (a member of the Group of Seven), and then headed for New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Edmund Yaghjian. He also took private classes with Julius Delbos. Merrill established his studio in Greenwich Village and supplemented his art income by teaching at a private school.
He traveled widely over the next several years filling his notebooks with pencil sketches.
After 18 years in New York he moved to the American west, where he fell in love with the stunning rock formations that characterize the region, and with pueblo life. Merrill settled in Taos in 1946 and proceeded to open an art gallery and a studio while volunteering to give art classes in several local educational institutions. The Merrills were very active members of the Taos artist community.
Merrill, who held several solo shows of his paintings and lithographs in the US, Canada and Mexico, died in Taos on 21 April 1973.
If you have a work by Merrill that may be of Lake Chapala, please get in touch!
The Taos News. “Arthur Merrill, artist, dead at 88.” Taos News, 25 April 1973.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.
English visual artist Eleanor Mason, a cousin of the British writer E. A. W. Mason, was born in the U.K. in about 1895 and studied art in France, Germany and Italy. Eleanor, variously known as Eleanore, Leonore, Evylin or Evelyn, lived in Ajijic after she became the wife of German cellist Alex von Mauch, one of the earliest long-term foreign residents of Ajijic.
Eleanor von Mauch, 1935
Prior to this marriage, Mason had lived in Pasadena, California, from 1917 to 1931, where she ran an art school for a time. She was a co-founder of the Laguna Beach Art Association in 1918 and belonged to the Pasadena Society of Women Painters & Sculptors, serving as its president in 1928. Her work was exhibited at the Laguna Beach Art Association (1921, 1924), West Coast Arts, Incorporated (1923), the Pasadena Women Painters & Sculptors (1928) and the Santa Cruz Art League (1929). She was also a member of the British Water Color Society.
The precise circumstances surrounding her decision to move to Mexico and marry Alex von Mauch are murky. American authoress Neill James, who moved to Ajijic in the mid-1940s, never met von Mauch or his bride but later wrote that the gossip in the village was that Alex’s marriage had been arranged by correspondence. According to James, von Mauch was:
“poor and very peculiar, always consulting the stars. He badly needed a rich wife, to share his proud old family crest and supply a background of house furnishings in keeping with his beautiful silver service. Naturally he consulted the stars and ordered one from the States, according to astral specifications. She came. After a trial marriage, they conformed with a legal ceremony. Each hoped the other possessed wealth, so the marriage ended in failure.”
The couple settled in Ajijic but the marriage was short-lived. Only a few months into the marriage, Alex took his own life. After her husband’s death, Eleanor appears to have divided her time between Pasadena and Mexico. In January 1937, for example, her participation in the Pasadena New Year’s Day parade was noted in the Los Angeles Times because she was dressed as a giant butterfly, alongside a giant 20-foot rose, on the “Roses of Romance” float. The “body of the butterfly was Eleanor Mason of Pasadena, dressed in green and gold brocade, gold coronet on her head and a floral train.”
Romance must certainly have been in the air since later that year, in Guadalajara, Eleanor married Leif Clausen, a Danish-born and educated artist and writer based in New York. The notice of her marriage in the Los Angeles Times described her as “Mme Eleanor Mason von Mauch” of Laguna [Beach], and said that the widow of Baron Alexander von Mauch was a member of both the Laguna Beach Art Association and the British Water Color Society.
After her marriage to Clausen, Eleanor’s trail goes cold and nothing further has come to light about her life and legacy.
If you have any works, or photos of works, by this artist, please share!
Sources:
Edan Hughes. 1989. Artists in California, 1786-1940. Hughes Pub. Co.
El Informador, 3 May 1936, 4; 8 May 1936, 4.
Neill James. 1946. Dust on my Heart: Petticoat Vagabond in Mexico. New York: Charles Scribner’s.
Los Angeles Times, 25 Dec 1921, 36; 31 July 1935, 30; 26 Sep 1937, 66.
Santa Ana Register, 10 Mar 1923, 14; 12 January 1924, 5.
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.
In researching the artists and authors associated with Lake Chapala, I now have a long list of enigmatic references to lesser known artists, whose life and work remain very much a mystery.
One of the more intriguing is a “Miss Trude Neuhaus,” a German artist, who, according to the New York Times of 1 Nov 1925, brought “an exhibition of paintings, water colors and drawings of Mexican types and scenery” to the Anderson Galleries in New York. The show at the Anderson Galleries ran from 3-14 November 1925. The pieces had previously been exhibited at the National Art Gallery in Mexico City, and the exhibition also included “Aztec figurines and pottery recently excavated by the artist in Chapala, Mexico”. (Note that collecting ancient artifacts as souvenirs and removing them from the country was a common practice at the time, albeit one that is now subject to legal provisions and generally frowned upon.)
The only background offered about Miss Neuhaus is that she had “studied under Burmester in Munich” (possibly Georg Burmester, 1864–1936) and was a portrait painter in Germany. According to the short piece in the New York Times, she planned to return to Germany “after exhibiting her work in the large cities of the United States”, in order “to make several portraits, for which she has commissions.”
This Trude Neuhaus painting dates from 1919, before she visited Mexico.
Trude Neuhaus. 1919. Untitled, Credit: Willem Eppink.
A few more details have surfaced over the past few years about Trude Neuhaus, but none that explains why she visited Chapala.
According to U.S. immigration records, Neuhaus was born in early 1899 in Gottingen, Germany, and was 26 years and 7 months of age when she entered the U.S. for the exhibition in New York. The exhibit followed a stay of 14 months in Mexico from summer 1924 to September 1925, which means she was in Chapala shortly after D. H. Lawrence was there, and at exactly the same time as artist Everett Gee Jackson was living in the lakeside village.
Trude Neuhaus. c. 1925 “Florista Mexicana.”
No details have yet emerged of her exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Mexico City. However, after New York, “the young and already renowned artist” returned to Germany and showed her drawings, paintings and collection of artifacts at the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts) in Berlin in February 1925. A reviewer of the show described Miss Neuhaus as “an enthusiastic admirer” of Mexico, who “has dedicated her brush to reproducing popular types and customs of that country,” ranging from beggars and young people on the street to “a little Indian girl with a sad expression,” potters in their workshops and florists from Xochimilco.
Trude Neuhaus. c. 1925 “Remero de Xochimilco.”
The watercolors in the show that attracted attention included paintings of “the picturesque streets of Aguascalientes and Zacatlán and a sunset by the sea.” The mention of Zacatlán (in the state of Puebla), which is rarely visited even today by tourists, is especially interesting and suggests that Trude Neuhaus was a very adventurous young lady.
In addition to her artwork, the Berlin exhibit included the objects Neuhaus had found at Chapala and elsewhere as well as “some samples of the artistic industries that currently exist in Mexico, such as yarns, fabrics and ceramics made by Galán [sic], the famous potter from Tlaquepaque.” This is likely to refer to Armando Galván Rodríguez, born in 1898, who was recognized as a preeminent potter in Tonalá.
The artist was accompanied by her mother, Toni Neuhaus, to the opening of the show, which attracted numerous German and Mexican dignitaries.
Only one month after the show in Berlin, Trude Neuhaus was on her way back to Mexico, this time as a married woman, the wife of Rudolf (Rodolfo) May. May was born on 17 June 1894 in Nuremberg, Germany, and served in a Germany artillery unit during the first world war. By the mid-1920s, he was living in Mexico City. While May was not in New York at the time of Neuhaus’ show there, he passed through the city en route to Germany at the end of November 1925.
In March 1926, the newly married couple returned to Mexico from Hamburg on board the SS Rio Bravo. The ship’s manifest lists them as Rudolf May, a merchant aged 32, and Trude May, aged 30. (Trude would actually have been 27 years old according to the US immigration document referred to earlier.)
A decade later, “Trude Neuhaus-May” was the co-applicant with Angel M. Diez for a patent and trade-mark for a “mechanism for veering the headlamps of automobiles”. This patent was granted in Mexico in 1936 and in the U.S. two years later.
Both Rodolfo and Trude became naturalized Mexican citizens at some point prior to when Rodolfo visited Germany for several weeks in 1937-1938. Rodolfo (unaccompanied by his wife) entered the U.S. on his way to Europe on 23 November 1937 and landed at New York on his return on 4 February 1938.
In May 1955, and again in May 1959, Rodolfo and Trude took an Air France flight from Mexico City to New York; it is unclear if New York was their final destination or whether they were in transit to Europe. These flights list the address of their Mexico City residence as Amores #211 (Colonia del Valle).
Rodolfo died in Mexico City in March 1961 and Trude died there seven months later.
Trude and Rodolfo had three children: Beatriz, Rodolfo (1929-1996) and Luis (c 1932-1965).
Among the many questions still unanswered is whether or not Trude Neuhaus continued her art career after she married and returned to live in Mexico—the only known works of this artist all date back to before her exhibitions in 1925 and 1926.
The only auction record for Trude Neuhaus is for a painting entitled “Indian mother and child” (date unknown) which sold in the U.S. in 1984 for $500.
Can anyone help fill in some of the blanks about this “mystery artist”? If so, please get in touch!
Sources
Luis Kabikef. 1926. “Exposición de cuadros.” Berliner Tageblatt, Año 4, #2 (February 1926), 8.
New York Times. 1925. “Miss Neuhaus shows paintings.” New York Times, 1 Nov 1925, W20.
Acknowledgment
My sincere thanks to Willem Eppink (see comments) for allowing me the use of a photo of a Trude Neuhaus painting in his possession.
Note: This post is an extended version of a post first published 13 December 2015.
Other mysteries relating to Lake Chapala authors and artists:
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcome. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.
Famous Swedish painter Nils Dardel (1888-1943) visited Chapala towards the end of his life at a time when he was mainly painting fine watercolor portraits. Does anyone have additional knowledge about his visit (or visits) or recognize a friend or family member in any of the following paintings?
All of the paintings are believed to date from about 1940-1942.
Nils Dardel. ca 1940. Mexican girl with braided hair.
Nils Dardel. ca 1940. Mexican girl.
Nils Dardel. ca 1940. Mexican girl (2).
Nils Dardel. ca 1940. Mexican man.
Nils Dardel. ca 1940. Mexican woman.
Nils Dardel. ca 1940. Mexican boy.
Nils Dardel. ca 1940. Mexican boy. (2)
Nils Dardel. ca 1940. Elderly Mexican lady.
Nils Dardel. ca 1940. Mexican lady.
Nils Dardel. ca 1940. Mexican lady.
Dardel was traveling with Swedish writer Edita Morris, the love of his life, and the couple also visited Central America including Guatemala.
Nils Elias Kristofer von Dardel, who took to calling himself simply Nils Dardel, was born on 25 October 1888 in Bettna, Sweden, and died of a heart attack in New York on 25 May 1943.
Dardel studied at the Stockholm Royal Academy of Arts from 1908 to 1910 and then spent many years living in Paris, working as a set designer for the Ballets Suédois and painting surrealist fantasies. In 1921, Dardel married a fellow Swedish artist: Baroness Thora Klinkowström. However, in the late 1930s Dardel fell in love with Edita Toll Morris, a beautiful, married, Swedish-born author. The new couple soon moved to New York and over the course of the next two or three years they traveled to Central America and Mexico. Attempts to reconstruct their precise itinerary are hampered by the fact that, following Nils’ death in 1943, Edita asked their friends to destroy all correspondence (a not uncommon request at that time).
Mona Lang and her colleague Kurt Skoog in Sweden, who are working on a documentary of Nils Dardel’s life and work, believe that Nils and Edita were in Mexico and Guatemala from 1940 onwards. The couple was living in Chapala in May 1941 and probably remained there until Christmas, with short visits elsewhere including to the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco. Nils was in poor health (he had heart problems from an early age) and one letter makes it clear that he found the local Chapala climate “perfect” for him.
In Chapala, Nils and Edita rented the Villa Monte Carlo and were especially pleased by the extensive grounds, writing that their garden was the largest and most beautiful in all of Chapala. Their cook was apparently a local women named Magdalena. While in Chapala, Dardel worked on paintings based on sketches he had made in Guatemala and elsewhere and is presumed to have also completed paintings of some individuals living in Chapala.
Nils and Edita were guests at the wedding in Ajijic in October 1941 of Sarah Hunt Shearer and David Holbrook Kennedy, who painted the earliest known mural at Lake Chapala. Also present at the ceremony and reception which followed were David’s two sisters: the food writer Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, and author Norah Oliver Kennedy, who wrote several stories while in Mexico for submission to The New Yorker; Nigel Stansbury-Millett and his father, Harry Millett; Mr and Mrs Francisco Nicolau of Guadalajara and their son Sergio; Mr and Mrs Casimiro Ramírez and two children; and the Honorable Mr Maurice Stafford (US Consul).
Not long after spending the summer of 1942 in the Hotel Belmar in Mazatlán, Dardel and Edita returned to New York where an exhibition of his Mexican and Guatemalan paintings was held at The Architectural League of New York, prior to being sent on tour to various U.S. cities. Even after Nils died in New York (on 25 May 1943 at the artist hotel The Beaux Arts on 44th Street), the tour continued, though it was now referred to as a Memorial Exhibition.
A reviewer in Philadelphia, where the exhibit opened in October at the American Swedish Historical Museum, wrote that,
“Here are some of the fruits of the artist’s recent two year stay in Mexico and Central America, and water-color specialists will discover in his large paintings of native Latin-American types an amazing skill in execution and a deep knowledge of the medium’s use, especially in covering large areas.
The artist’s fantasies in oil however indicate more potently his inventive and imaginative powers. In these he has utilized certain Peruvian and Ecuadorian decorative themes in the presentation of such episodes as David and Goliath and the Biblical swine possessed by devils; “The Fishermen,” “Head-Hunters’ Breakfast,” and “Head-Hunters’ Afternoon”….
Card-players will take special delight in his treatment of “The Heart Family and “Queen of Diamonds” while “Adoration,” with its humorous skeletons of men and animals will set beholders to wondering about the alliance of subject matter and title. All these fantasies present something enchanting and decidedly refreshing in art…”
After the exhibition tour of U.S. cities was complete, Dardel’s paintings were returned to Sweden and went on show in Stockholm. There, his art met with a lukewarm reception from most art critics but was adored by the Swedish public. In 1946-1947, the exhibition traveled all over Sweden, always attracting big crowds. Reproductions of his portraits were produced for many years and sold well. They can regularly be found on Ebay and similar online auction sites.
Nils Dardel’s wonderful original paintings can be seen in museums in several European cities, including Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Oslo and Hamburg. His surrealist works command very high prices and his painting entitled “Waterfall”, which sold in 2012 for $3.7 million, was the record price ever paid at auction for a work by a Swedish artist.
My sincere thanks to Mona Lang for first bringing Dardel’s connection to Chapala to my attention, and to Annabel Florman (see comments) for providing the last two images.
Note
This post, first published on 7 December 2017, was updated in July 2022.
Sources
Folke Holmér. 1946. Nils Dardel I Mexico och Guatemala. (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum).
The Philadelphia Inquirer: 27 October 1943, p 27; 7 November 1943, p 48.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Watercolorist, etcher and illustrator Elbridge Gerry Peirce Jr., more usually known simply as Gerry Peirce, was born in Jamestown, New York on 3 June 1900 and died in Tucson, Arizona, on 16 March 1969.
Peirce visited Ajijic in the mid-1940s, and may have been there more than once since he is known to have made several trips to Mexico. His visit to Ajijic, believed to be in 1945, was recorded by American author Neill James who had settled in the village a year or two previously: “Gary Pierce [sic], director of an art school in New Mexico, visited our village and executed many delicate water colors and engravings.” (Modern Mexico, October 1945). Despite the misspelling, and the fact that the art school that he directed was actually in Arizona, there is absolutely no doubt that James was writing about Gerry Peirce. Sadly, the whereabouts of his paintings and engravings of Ajijic remain a mystery.
Peirce graduated from the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art) in 1925, and also studied at the Art Students League in New York City. He married his childhood sweetheart, Priscilla, and the couple moved to Nova Scotia, Canada, where Peirce began to execute etchings and engravings.
Gerry Peirce. Desert Rock. Undated.
After Canada, Peirce and his wife lived and worked in New Orleans. His time in New Orleans is particularly noteworthy because he was one of the co-organizers and charter members of the New Orleans Art League in December 1929. The other organizers were Harry Armstrong Nolan (1891-1929), Gideon Townsend Stanton (1885-1964), William Weeks Hall (1895-1958) and Henry Costello. By coincidence, Gideon Townsend Stanton also had close family links to Chapala: his maternal grandparents had a holiday home there for several years at the very end of the nineteenth century.
This early dry point, The Cat, is one of several dry points gifted by Peirce to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1934:
Gerry Peirce. The Cat. 1932. Credit: Cleveland Museum of Art.
In the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, Peirce and his wife lived in various places, including Florida, Cuba, Washington D.C., New York City and Philadelphia, where Peirce established a commercial art studio, producing cards for Cartier and Tiffany & Co. Later, the Peirces moved to Colorado and began to spend winters in Arizona, eventually making their home in Tucson, Arizona, in the mid-1930s. Peirce opened an atelier (“The Print Room”) in Tucson in 1934 and continued to produce wonderful dry point engravings. He also turned his hand to books.
Writing as “Percival Stutters”, Peirce wrote and illustrated at least two children’s books: How Percival Caught the Tiger (1936) and How Percival Caught the Python (1937), both published by Holiday House. Peirce also drew the black and white illustrations for Plants of Sun and Sand: The Desert Growth of Arizona, which had short texts by Stanford Stevens and was published by The Print Room, Tucson, in 1939. The original edition of that particular book is highly distinctive since it had a plywood cover.
Gerry Peirce. Untitled watercolor. Unknown date.
At about this time, a sketching trip with Stevens turned out to have a momentous impact on Peirce’s subsequent art career. As Peirce later recalled:
One day I was looking at a scene Stan was doing and wondered why he had picked out that particular spot. Why paint that I asked? His reply, “Because it has such a beautiful color,” jolted me right out of everything I’d been doing for the past twelve years. I realized that I was no longer seeing a landscape with its colors, but in terms of the black and white of etchings. I saw that even my etchings were becoming flat no longer suggesting the color of things.”
Though he never stopped producing his exquisite engravings, after Peirce picked up a brush and watercolors, he never looked back. He soon gained recognition as one of the country’s leading watercolorists. He was also a fine teacher and his studio-classroom attracted students from all across the country. In 1947, the Tucson Watercolor Guild was organized to provide a permanent studio and classroom space for Peirce to continue his work. His teaching career was curtailed by a heart attach in 1967.
In later life, Peirce wrote two non-fiction works: Creative You (The Print Room, 1954) and Painting the southwest landscape in watercolor (Reinhold Pub. Corp., 1961).
Peirce’s timeless portrayals of the Arizona desert and his tireless efforts to help others see the beauty he saw helped shape Tucson into the artistic center of Arizona.
History Moment: Gerry Peirce (story by Tony Paniagua) is a professionally-produced 5-minute video summarizing Peirce’s career and art.
From Arizona, Peirce made several sorties into Mexico. The wonderful collection of prints, published by The Print Room in 1969 as The drawings of Mexico, included images of San Miguel de Allende; Marfil and La Valenciana (both in Guanajuato); and of Tzintzuntzan (Michoacán). By this time, Peirce was no longer completing watercolors en plein air but was making quick pencil sketches or rapid watercolor impressions in the field to serve as memory aids for his final paintings done back in the studio.
A contemporary reviewer described the collection as “a portfolio of reproductions of pencil drawings made by Gerry Peirce in Mexico, a country he visits frequently and understands. This understanding and his affection for the country and its people are reflected in every sensitive line and shading of these outstanding drawings.”
Gerry Peirce. Nogales hillside. Undated.
Peirce was a frequent exhibitor wherever he lived and a member of the Society of American Etchers, the Chicago Society of Etchers, and the California Print Makers. Note that the oft-repeated claim in contemporary newspaper accounts that Peirce had been awarded an honorary doctorate in art by “St. Andrews University College in London” can not be substantiated since there is no record of any institution of that name, though it is possible that Peirce was granted an honorary degree by St. Andrew’s University in Scotland.
Peirce’s work is in numerous museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Harvard’s Fogg Museum; the Boston Museum of Fine Art; the Library of Congress; Joslyn Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; the J.P. Speed Memorial Museum (now Speed Art Museum) in Louisville, Kentucky; Denver Art Museum; Arizona Museum of Art; Tucson Museum of Art; the Mobile Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; University of Arizona Art Museum; and the New Mexico Museum of Art.
In 1980, more than a decade after Peirce’s death, a retrospective exhibition of his watercolors and etchings was held at the Kay Bonfoey Studio and Gallery in Tucson. Bonfoey, one of his former students, had purchased the adobe-and-redwood building that had formerly been Peirce’s studio and classroom space after his death to run her own gallery, and to continue the legacy of the Tucson Watercolor Guild. Interviewed at the time, Bonfoey said that Peirce was:
… a unique human being. He wasn’t just a teacher of art, he was a philosopher, a thinker. No two classes were ever the same, the explorations were always different, always … well, awesome. He constantly looked into the relationship between nature and art. Nature was the base for everything he saw in his paintings, in other people’s work, in life around him.”
A fitting tribute to one of America’s great twentieth-century watercolorists.
Art Life magazine. “Biography of Gerry Peirce”. Art Life magazine.
Arnold Elliott. 1951. Tucson Festival of the Arts, Exhibition Catalogue, March 25-April 8, 1951.
Judith H. Bonner. 2011. “New Orleans Art League.” Article dated 23 May 2011 in Encyclopedia of Louisiana, edited by David Johnson. (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities).
Peter H. Falk (ed). 1985. Who was who in American art, 1564-1975.
Neill James. 1945. “I live in Ajijic”, in Modern Mexico, October 1945.
John Peck. 1980. “Late artist Peirce comes home.” Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), 11 May 1980, p 75.
Peggy and Harold Samuels. 1985. Encyclopedia of Artists of The American West. Castle Books.
Tucson Daily Citizen (Tucson, Arizona). 15 October 1960, p 12; 1 September 1965, p 15; 13 August 1966, p 29; 17 March 1969, p 22 (obituary).
Warren Times Mirror (Warren, Pennsylvania), 11 December 1934, p 5; 11 March 1939, p 2; 1 August 1939, p 8; 16 March 1949, p 4.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Richard D. Yip is included in the large group of artists associated with Lake Chapala on the strength of a painting entitled “Facade, Chapala, Mexico” which he exhibited in the All Southern California Art Exhibit in Long Beach, California in 1952. Sadly, beyond that, I have managed to find nothing more relating to his visit or visits to Lake Chapala.
Yip was born in Canton, China, in 1919. He emigrated from China to the U.S. in 1931. After completing high school, he studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. After serving as a gunner and radioman on a B-24 in the U.S. Air Force during the second world war, he returned to California and settled in Stockton, where he studied at the College (later University) of the Pacific in Stockton for his B.A. and at the University of California at Berkeley for his Masters degree. Yip was the first Chinese person to receive American citizenship because of military service.
Richard Yip. San Rafael. 1944.
By early 1947, Yip was living and working with fellow artist Craig Sharp on a yacht, the Lassen, in Sausalito harbor. Yip was already working in watercolors and held solo shows which attracted positive reviews. Later that year he left California to return to China to see his family and study art there. He visited various cities and amassed a body of work that he brought back to California with him in 1948.
While in China, Yip married a girl named Lae. The couple’s first child, daughter Pak Mui (“White Blossom”), named after a boat Yip had admired in Sausalito harbor, was born aboard ship en route back to San Francisco. Perhaps not surprisingly, U.S. immigration officials initially denied entry to the mother, who spoke no English, and daughter, but they were eventually allowed to remain and were able to join Yip and other members of his family in Stockton.
Yip hoped to show some of his work at the state fair in Sacramento in September 1948.
Presumably, it is at this stage of his career that Yip spent some time in Mexico, including a visit to Chapala where he painted “Facade, Chapala, Mexico”.
Yip taught art at the University of the Pacific in Stockton for many years and led many plein air painting workshops. By 1955, the promotional material for one of these workshops describes Yip, the instructor, as a “California watercolorist who has studied, painted and exhibited throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe and China.”
Yip maintained links to Sausalito and spent many summers painting in Marin, where he was a member of, and gave talks to, the Marin Society of Artists. He was also a long-time member of the California Water Color Society.
By 1961, the build-up to a talk by Yip on “some of the trends in contemporary art” says that Yip “has conducted painting classes at the College of the Pacific, Stockton College, the annual Monterery Peninsula Painting Tours, Death Valley Tours, Marin County, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, the East Bay, Phoenix, Arizona, Sacramento, San Jose and other places for the past 12 years.” By that time, his work had appeared in several national publications, and his watercolors had won various national and international awards. Yip was also elected a Life Member of the International Institute of Arts and Letters of Switzerland.
It appears that Yip retired from college teaching at about this time, though he continued to lead painting tours, including at least one to Mexico in 1963. (In January 1964, another Stockton artist, Marjorie Tanner, gave a talk to Lodi Art Club about the tour, led by Richard Yip, she had undertaken in Mexico.
Richard Yip died in 1981. Several works by Yip have been sold at auction in recent years, including ‘The Red Church’ sold at Bonhams, Los Angeles, in 2011.
Sources:
Independent Press-Telegram, Long Beach, California, 9 March 1952, Page 8.
Gordon T. McClelland and Jay T. Last. “California Watercolors 1850-1970”.
CalART.com. Richard D. Yip (Biography from CalART.com), based on interview with Roy Yip, 1985.
Daily Independent Journal, San Rafael, California, 21 February 1955, Page 8
Sausalito News, 3 June 1948; 11 May 1957
Lodi News-Sentinel, 11 Feb 1961; 13 Jan 1964
Other Sausalito artists associated with Lake Chapala:
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.
Catalan artist and writer Avel-lí Artís-Gener, who often signed his art simply “Tisner”, left Spain for exile in Mexico following the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). He lived in Mexico for 25 years, and visited and painted Lake Chapala in the early 1940s.
Tisner was born in Barcelona, Spain, on 28 May 1912 and died in that city on 7 May 2000.
Tisner. Untitled. 1953.
Artís-Gener exhibited numerous times in Mexico City. His work was included in a group show for the 4th National Floriculture Exhibition in May 1945, and a painting entitled “Chapala” featured in his third solo exhibit in Mexico City in the first half of September 1946, in the vestibule of the Cine Mageriti.
Artís-Gener has another interesting link to Chapala. One of his students for watercolor classes was Conrado Contreras, who has since produced, among other works of art, numerous fine watercolors of the Lake Chapala area. Contreras and his wife (poet, writer and educator Zaida Cristina Reynoso) moved to Chapala with their two young children in 1975, and have lived here ever since.
As a young man in Spain, Tisner had articles and cartoons published in a variety of media, including El Be Negre, Mercantil, l’Opinió, La Rambla, Esport i ciutadania and La Publicitat.
At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Tisner received death threats and fled to Paris. Soon after, he joined the Republican Army and returned to fight. During the war, Tisner edited Meridià, Amic and Vèncer, magazines written for the combatants.
During his time in Mexico (from 1940), Tisner worked as a journalist, cartoonist and scenery designer for Mexico City’s Channel 4, as well as working in publicity and as an editor. He retained close links with other exiles from the Catalan community. His cartoons appeared in Full Català, Quaderns de l’Exili, Revista de Refugiats d’Amèrica, Lletres, Pont Blau, Tele-revista, La Nostra Revista (founded by his father), and its successor La Nova Revista, founded by the artist himself.
Tisner took particular interest in Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past, which was the motivation behind his best known book, Paraules d’Opòton el Vell (1968). Other works written by Tisner (he almost always wrote in Catalan), include 556 Brigada Mixta (1945); Prohibida l’evasió (1969); L’Enquesta del Canal 4 (1973); Les nostres coses (1978); Els gossos d’Acteó (1983); and Ciris trencats (La Campana.
In 1965, Tisner returned to Catalonia, where he worked initially as a journalist for the daily El Correo Catalán, and later became deputy director of the Catalan weekly Tele/Estel. In 1970 he translated Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad into Catalan. During his later years, he worked for a large number of different newspapers and magazines, including Avui, El Periódico, Catalunya Informació, L’Avenç, Serra d’Or, Canigó, Cultura, El Triangle, El Món, Presència, and Espais mediterranis.
Tisner was politically active in the 1980s, and in 1988 received the Creu de Sant Jordi, one of the highest civil distinctions awarded in Catalonia. He also won a City of Barcelona prize for Catalan prose. He was a founding member of the Association of Catalan Language Writers, and the group’s president from 1990 to 1994.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.
