RARE Antique Early California Impressionist Oil Painting, Gunnison Porter'25
This is a historically Important and RARE Antique Early California Impressionist Oil Painting on canvas, by pioneering female California Impressionist painter Julia S. Gunnison Porter 1867 - 1952. This work depicts horses pulling rocks across the ground, and various workmen toiling on the construction of an early road in San Diego County, California. This work was formerly exhibited at the Pasadena Museum of History, from 2018 - 2019 as part of their exhibit, SOMETHING REVEALED; California Women Artists Emerge, 1860 - 1960. Porter was an oil heiress, her father U.
Oilman Austin Gunnison founded Inland Oil Company in Southern California, and her privileged upbringing allowed her to study art in Paris, where she was undoubtedly influenced by the burgeoning French Impressionists of the time. She moved to San Diego in the 1920's, which is when this work was created. Gunnison Porter on the top stretcher bar.
Additionally, a museum exhibition label on the verso of the frame reads: PASADENA MUSEUM OF HISTORY... SOMETHING REVEALED; California Women Artists Emerge, 1860 - 1960...
September 29, 2018 - March 31, 2019... Untitled - Road Construction, San Diego County, California, circa 1925.This piece is approximately 20 3/4 x 24 inches including frame. Actual artwork is approximately 14 x 17 1/4 inches. Good condition for age, aside from one small spot of damage and minor paint loss to the upper left quadrant of the canvas please see photos.
This work has been professionally re-lined for posterity and has light age-related craquelure in some areas. Porter's paintings are very rare, and only a handful have ever come up for sale since the invention of the internet. Acquired from an old estate in Pasadena, California. If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check out my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks! Gunnison Porter (1867 - 1952) was active/lived in California, Ohio. Julia Porter is known for Painting. Born in Glendale, OH on May 22, 1867, the daughter of pioneer oilman Austin Gunnison. Julia studied art in NYC at the ASL and NAD, and continued in Paris at Académie Julian. At the latter she became interested in painting animals and then went to Montreal, Canada where she studied animal anatomy at the veterinary department of McGill University. Upon moving to San Diego County in the late 1920s, Julia lived in the rural Escondido and Poway areas until her demise on May 31, 1952. Exh: San Diego FA Gallery, 1927; San Diego Art Guild, 1941. Glendale, Ohio May 22, 1867 d.Poway, California May 31, 1952. The daughter of pioneer U.
Oilman Austin Gunnison, Julia began her study of art in New York at the Art Students' League and National Academy of Design. Later, she took instruction at the Academie Julian in Paris where she became interested in painting animals. This led to her study of animal anatomy at the veterinary department of McGill University at Montreal, Canada.
Moving to San Diego County in the late 1920s, Julia lived in the rural Escondido and Poway areas. A member of the San Diego Art Guild, she exhibited locally in the 1930s and 1940s. Escondido Times -Advocate 10-18-70 15:1-3; SDU 4-27-51 A10:1-2, 6-2-52 B3:1.
Grandmother Porter was the daughter of Austin Gunnison who had a very successful oil business (Inland Oil Company) and was tutored at home and later in Europe becoming a very talented artist and pianist. Although I never heard her play I have seen her music, a collection of all major classical composers works taking taking more than 18of shelf space. While living in Delta Colorado where my mother Julia Ethel Porter and uncle William Herbert Porter were born she wanted a piano, a 7' Steinway from New York.
Unfortunately that instrument was lost in a house fire in Escondido California in 1945 when she was moving to Poway. That property is now Old Poway Park. Some additional reflections on this great lady. She was definitely from the old school! As a widow in the'40s and'50s she teamed up with an artist friend Florence McCune (Mackie) who drove her all over the western states where they would paint the desert and Indian reservation scenes.
As they traveled she always kept a little green velvet sewing bag on the passenger side floor with her Smith and Wesson. She apparently was not ignorant of it's use. While she was in North Carolina there was a man hiding behind a tree and she hit the tree which routed the scoundrel. Earlier in her life she was horse back riding when she was struck by lightning. Fortunately she survived with no injury however the horse didn't. At this late date (June 2020) I was unable to get confirmation of this story. BRIEF LIFE HISTORY OF JULIA SHEPARD GUNNISON PORTER. When Julia Shepard Gunnison was born on 22 May 1867, in Town of Canandaigua, Ontario, New York, United States, her father, Austin R. GUNNISON, was 34 and her mother, Margaret Sophia Shepard, was 35. She married Herbert Kent Porter on 15 November 1893, in New York City, New York, United States. They were the parents of at least 2 sons and 1 daughter.She lived in Escondido Township, San Diego, California, United States in 1940 and San Diego, San Diego, California, United States in 1952. She died on 31 May 1952, in Poway, San Diego, California, United States, at the age of 85, and was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati, Hamilton, Ohio, United States. Julia Shepard Gunnison Porter was the daughter of Austin Gunnison, an amateur art and antique collector and first cousin of the famous Capt. John Gunnison, the individual for whom the town of Gunnison was named.
Julia Porter and her father were guests on the platform at the ceremonies in Montrose when President William Howard Taft officially opened the Gunnison Tunnel in 1909. From the Shadows to the Spotlight: Masterworks by California's Unknown Women Artists.
The old cobbled street is shown on a quiet morning. A saleswoman perches uncomfortably on a stool in front of her terra cotta pot stall and gazes over at two men browsing the pots across the way. Behind her, another shopkeeper stands in her doorway beside a display of ceramic vases and jars as a woman in a headscarf strolls along the sidewalk.
In front of the seated woman, a small child approaches a dog who appears oblivious to them all as he busily scratches an itch. Above them all in the center of the painting and thrusting into the sky is the tower of the Los Angeles City Hall, a building completed in 1928- the only clue that dates the oil painting. At the bottom right-hand corner is the artist's signature V. Staples - a genderless mark that reveals next to nothing about the artist who painted this masterful portrait of the heart of Los Angeles. M Staples was Vera C. Staples, and like many female artists working decades ago, she hid her gender, and her life story and work disappeared into the shadows of the art world. Revealing the identities of artists such as Staples and redressing the imbalance in our understanding of the art history of California became the professional and personal passion of Pasadena-based art conservator and curator Maurine St. Gaudens over a decade ago.During her work as a conservator, she handled many fine paintings signed with only initials and a surname that turned out to be by women who worked in California for many decades of the state's history. Her curiosity about these mysterious and highly talented women drove her to find out more about them, and soon she realized that a whole section of California's artistic and cultural heritage had been lost.
As the project grew beyond her own capacity, she reached out to independent researcher and historian Joseph Morsman who was delighted to join her in her quest to rediscover these women. "Many of these women married and changed their names or moved across the country, so finding biographical information about them was very challenging, " he explains. Gaudens, Morsman was relentless in his search for their stories. In the case of Cora A.
Van Epps, he explains, I spent two years searching for her. I discovered that she had moved from Illinois to California and with the help of a fellow historian in Peoria, I was able to trace her early life in Illinois, her initial visits to California in the early 1900s until she eventually settled in Los Angeles where she remained until her death in 1947. The artist who painted Olvera Street, they discovered, was born Vera Clarice Milborough Bush in England in 1883. She moved to the U. In 1891 and married Edward P.For the next twenty-five years, she was known as Vera Carter, Vera C. In 1929, she married Robert Martin Staples, an original member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Known in her later years as Vera C. Robert Staples, she was a gifted landscape and genre painter with a studio on South Broadway and was active in many Los Angeles art associations until her death in 1954. Morsman's research revealed many exciting facts. Another interesting discovery were the bronze bells that line El Camino Real, the route that connects California's 21 Spanish missions, were originally designed and cast by a woman who went by the name A.
Forbes, a historian who sketched and documented the history of the missions, is the first known female metal forger in the United States. Together, the two intrepid researchers have documented hundreds of forgotten female artists, their lives, work and contribution to the state's cultural heritage in the four-volume set of reference books. Now, many of these works are the focus of the exhibition "Something Revealed" at the Pasadena Museum of History through March 31, 2019. Both galleries are packed with artworks that represent the styles and movements that shaped the arts in California, and the sheer volume of high-caliber works of art is overwhelming.
But that is the point of this exhibition - to demonstrate how much of the state's artistic history has been lost by ignoring the works of female artists. It also redefines how we must perceive women artists and their creative scope."We have traditionally thought that it was only the men who went out into nature and painted California's landscape and women painted children and small animals, " says St. Gaudens, But there were many women artists who also hiked out to Yosemite and other wild places and captured these rugged landscapes beautifully. Zeta Behné (Richardson)'s painting of a lake in the High Sierras is a spectacular example of the quality of landscape painting done by women in California over a century ago.
These artists lived lives full of talent, curiosity, determination and occasional public recognition, and many taught art themselves, exhibited their work, won awards and were commissioned by individual collectors and public institutions. They worked in a range of media from oil paintings, etchings and drawings to sculpture, ceramics, metal craft and folding screens, and depicted a rich variety of subject matter that spans a century of life in California. As the exhibition highlights, the artists mastered a broad range of artistic styles.
She similarly depicted the richness of the California landscape in styles that ranged from plein air to bold semi-abstraction. "But these women were not only drawn to beautiful natural landscapes, " points out St. Some of them chose to paint less comfortable urban landscapes with subjects that were far from romantic. In Southern California, two striking examples of these are Daisy M. An exceptionally talented painter born Ruth Blanchard Miller in Chicago but raised in Pasadena, she attended the Stickney Memorial Art School in Los Angeles, California and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.
She continued her studies in New York and the L' École des Beaux Arts in Paris. She left Paris because the school did not allow unmarried female students to work from nude models and moved to Florence, where she studied mural and fresco techniques and met an Italian artist who she followed to Rome. Her parents frowned on her unconventional lifestyle and brought her back to California, where she was soon married to Henry Fracker and took his name. She continued her painting (as Ruth Miller Fracker), gaining a reputation as a realist painter, earning significant local commission and even winning the silver medal in art for a painting exhibited in competition at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Her paintings are not only exceptionally well rendered but her subjects often unusual and depicted with great intelligence and biting wit, such as her 1941 painting "Death of a Christmas Tree, " which shows a decorated tree dumped upside down in a trash can next to a pile of discarded newspapers that announce that start of World War II.
The cross at the top of the scene created by the tree's wooden stand suggests that Christian values have been trashed along with the tree itself. Her powerful 1934 painting, "Housewife, " may reflect her own sense of emotional and social entrapment and distress, but the deep sadness apparent in the eyes of the housewife in the painting suggests that she saw this as a much more universal predicament for talented ambitious women.
After divorcing her first husband in 1954, she took her father's first name Kempster becoming Ruth Miller Kempster. In 1953 she had her first solo exhibition at the Pasadena Art Institute, her last public exhibition taking place in 1958. Although she continued to paint until her death in 1978, her work has surprisingly not been shown publicly since 1958. They separated in 1932 for 14 years, during which time Elsie painted the dramatic work "Bus Stop" (1943) in which an African American women turns and stares directly at the viewer. Her look is one of exhaustion and perhaps exasperation.
Within the context of this exhibition, the image takes on great significance, possibly representing a plea on behalf of all the talented female artists that you look at their work and invite it into museums and galleries, where their male counterparts have had the walls to themselves for a very long time. In the current #MeToo era, an exhibition that illuminates the significant artistic contributions of female artists is long overdue and very welcome. This item is in the category "Art\Paintings". The seller is "willsusa_utzeqm" and is located in this country: US. This item can be shipped to United States, Canada.Gunnison Porter