Artists at Continent's End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875-1907

Few regions rival the magnificence of California's Monterey Peninsula. This beauty, together with a mild climate, rich history, and simplicity of lifestyle, encouraged the development of one of the nation’s foremost art colonies. From 1875 to the first years of the twentieth century, artists were drawn to the towns of Monterey, Pacific Grove, and then Carmel. Artists at Continent's End is the first in-depth examination of the importance of the Monterey Peninsula, which during this period came to epitomize California art. Beautifully illustrated with a wealth of images, including many never before published, this book tells the fascinating story of eight principal protagonistsJules Tavernier, William Keith, Charles Rollo Peters, Arthur Mathews, Evelyn McCormick, Francis McComas, Gottardo Piazzoni, and photographer Arnold Gentheand a host of secondary players who together established an enduring artistic legacy. Most previous accounts claim that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire were the reason that artists began to gather on the Monterey Peninsula. Shields challenges this view by demonstrating that the colony began much earlierand in Monterey, not Carmel, as often asserted. In an absorbing narrative that combines art and social history, Shields describes how, beginning with Jules Tavernier's arrival in 1875, art produced on the peninsula broke from its East and West Coast antecedents to become increasingly subjective, meditative, and simple. He maintains that, by the turn of the century, the majority of the artists in the region had arrived at a tonal style featuring moody atmospheric effects. Some went one step farther, producing canvases reductive in color and form; others practiced a more colorful impressionism. Created to accompany a major traveling exhibition of works of the Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, Artists at Continent's End places the movement in its art-historical context, comparing its achievement with other approaches including the Barbizon style, art nouveau, arts-and-crafts, and impressionism. Copub: Crocker Art Museum

Arts & Photography

Shields, Scott A.

History & Criticism

University of California Press

Few regions rival the magnificence of California's Monterey Peninsula. This beauty, together with a mild climate, rich history, and simplicity of lifestyle, encouraged the development of one of the nation’s foremost art colonies. From 1875 to the first years of the twentieth century, artists were drawn to the towns of Monterey, Pacific Grove, and then Carmel. Artists at Continent's End is the first in-depth examination of the importance of the Monterey Peninsula, which during this period came to epitomize California art. Beautifully illustrated with a wealth of images, including many never before published, this book tells the fascinating story of eight principal protagonists―Jules Tavernier, William Keith, Charles Rollo Peters, Arthur Mathews, Evelyn McCormick, Francis McComas, Gottardo Piazzoni, and photographer Arnold Genthe―and a host of secondary players who together established an enduring artistic legacy. Most previous accounts claim that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire were the reason that artists began to gather on the Monterey Peninsula. Shields challenges this view by demonstrating that the colony began much earlier―and in Monterey, not Carmel, as often asserted. In an absorbing narrative that combines art and social history, Shields describes how, beginning with Jules Tavernier's arrival in 1875, art produced on the peninsula broke from its East and West Coast antecedents to become increasingly subjective, meditative, and simple. He maintains that, by the turn of the century, the majority of the artists in the region had arrived at a tonal style featuring moody atmospheric effects. Some went one step farther, producing canvases reductive in color and form; others practiced a more colorful impressionism. Created to accompany a major traveling exhibition of works of the Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, Artists at Continent's End places the movement in its art-historical context, comparing its achievement with other approaches including the Barbizon style, art nouveau, arts-and-crafts, and impressionism. Copub: Crocker Art Museum

The paintings of Edwin Deakin--beautiful, romantic depictions of California's early architecture, particularly its missions, as well as picturesque and nostalgic scenes of California wilderness--are regarded as major achievements in early California art. Deakin's trip to Europe in 1877 also inspired breathtaking canvases, notably of Notre Dame in Paris and the Castle of Chillon on Lake Geneva. Later in Deakin's career, his brush captured the uniqueness of San Francisco's Chinatown and the destruction of the 1906 earthquake. Deakin (1838-1923) was equally gifted at still-life painting and produced magnificient compositions of fruits and flowers. Edwin Deakin: California Painter of the Picturesque is the first book to survey the artist's vast accomplishments, bringing together examples from all the genres in which he worked--including all twenty-one of his paintings of the California missions.
Born in Sheffield, England, Deakin first came to San Francisco in 1870. The next year he established a studio in the city and began exhibiting regularly. His later years were spent in Berkeley, where in 1890 he purchased a large tract of land and built a mission-style home. Today a street in Berkeley is named in his honor.
The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, developed this book in concert with an exhibition of the artist's paintings. Edwin Deakin has long been admired by aficionados of California art, but wider recognition of his accomplishments is overdue. This publication, with illuminating text by Alfred C. Harrison Jr., president of the The North Point Gallery, and Scott A. Shields, chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum, strives to further the painter's legacy as an important contributor to the canon of California--and American--art.

Edwin Deakin: California Painter of the Picturesque

Individual Artists

Pomegranate

Paintings and Works on Paper, 1946-1952

Van Doren Waxter

The most in-depth examination of the rich and varied careers of one of California's premier artistic couples Features previously unpublished works and new scholarship Positions the artists within the context of their peers, both in California and nationally Accompanies a major retrospective exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA (30 April-27 August 2023); travels to the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (14 October 2023-7 January 2024; and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN (28 January-30 March 2024) 
In reaction to the widespread pursuit of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Paul Wonner and William “Theophilus” Brown were among the artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who began to re-engage with the visible world, applying the gestural style of action painting to depictions of people, landscapes, and still lifes. Together, the couple aligned themselves with this new direction and became leading practitioners of the style known today as Bay Area Figuration. Over time, both artists' works became less gestural and more overtly representational. Brown became known for his psychologically evocative landscapes with classic bathers, as well as for his lonely urban scenes. Wonner received greatest acclaim for his “baroque” still lifes laden with everyday objects, animals, and flowers. Published to accompany the most comprehensive exhibition of the artists' work ever mounted, this exquisite publication offers an in-depth study of these trailblazing artists. Exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA (30 April-27 August 2023) travels to the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (14 October 2023-7 Jan 2024); and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN (28 January-30 March 2024).

Breaking the Rules: Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown

Gonzalez, Matt

Scala Arts Publishers, Inc.

San Francisco and the Second Wave: The Blair Collection of Abstract Expressionism

Beautiful catalogue containing full page color photographs of abstract expressionist paintings by San Francisco artists.

David J Carlsn -etal.

Crocker art museum

Echoes of the Earth: Ceramics by Toshiko Takaezu

Rain Forest Visions : Amazonian Ceramics from Ecuador - the Melza and Ted Barr Collection

et.al.

Museum

A painter of figures, landscapes, architectural subjects, and still lifes, David Ligare (born 1945), expands the realist tradition through the very unreality of his art. Since the late 1970s, he has used his considerable technical skills and historical knowledge to create perfectly ordered Classical paintings influenced and informed by the ancient Greeks. At a time when few artists shared these interests or concerns, Ligare sought to make the ideas of antiquity relevant in today's world, hoping to spark a renewed desire for knowledge and offering paradigms of moral choice. Setting subjects within the specifics of California - and the Monterey Peninsula region in particular - he bathes them in the pure and wondrous light of the coast. This publication, David Ligare: California Classicist, released in conjunction with the exhibition organized by the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, evinces Ligare s admiration for the ancients and his love of California through revelatory essays, a chronology, and more than 200 reproductions and photographs. Contents: Foreword: Donald Kuspit Singular Perfection: David Ligare's Figuration Acknowledgments: Scott A. Shields and Lial A. Jones Introduction: Scott A. Shields David Ligare and Recurrent Classicism Chapter 1: Scott A. Shields - California Classicist Chapter 2: David Stuart Rodes - The Literate Picture Chapter 3: Patricia Junker - Vie Coye/Life Stilled Chronology: Scott A. Shields Selected Bibliography Index

David Ligare: California Classicist

Rodes, David

Junker, Patricia

Papadakis Dist A/C

Many of the works in this lovely private collection are by Hudson River School painters, who focused on the landscape and pursued a highly polished, detailed technique. Key artists include first-generation practitioners Asher B. Durand and Thomas Doughty, as well as popular landscape painters of the second generation, including Albert Bierstadt, Stanford Robinson Gifford, John Frederick Kensett, and Thomas Worthington Whittredge. The collection also contains meticulously rendered stilllifes by artists such as Severin Roesen and William Harnett, in addition to scenes of American Daily Life by Eastman Johnson, Enoch Wood Perry, Jr., and others. Collectively, these paintings communicate a spirit of American optimism, of transcendental wonderment in nature, of national abundance, and even of nostalgia for ways of life that, even as the scenes were being created, seemed already to be passing.

American Beauty and Bounty: The Judith G. and Steaven K. Jones Collection of Nineteenth-Century Painting

ROBERTSON, Bruce

Roaring Forties Press

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