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Hanson Puthuff -
Biography
Hanson Puthuff was born in 1875 in
Waverly, Missouri. He is primarily remembered for his California
landscapes and desert paintings, and his involvement in the Southern
California art world in the early 20th century. His paintings of
rolling hills, canyons, and atmospheric effects of Southern California,
the Sierras, and desert scenes are widely admired.
Puthuff childhood was filled with both uncertainty and strife. He was
born to a struggling carpenter, Alonzo Augustus Duvall, and his wife,
Mary Anne Lee. When Puthuff was two, his mother died and he was given
to the care of her close friend Elizabeth Stadley Puthuff, a young Civil
War widow who supported herself as a seamstress. She became his
surrogate mother, and he later assumed her name. Puthuff remained close
to her, with the exception of a period of eight years, when his father
took him at age six to live with various relatives in Kentucky, and
later with himself for a short time in Oklahoma.
"Malibu
Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches
SOLD
After studying at the Chicago Art
Institute, Puthuff and his foster mother moved to Colorado in 1889. She
was responsible for his art training in 1893 at the University of Denver
Art School and then the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Through friends
and relatives she then helped him start a career in commercial
art,-first as a mural painter in Peoria, Illinois, and later as a poster
and sign painter for an advertising firm in Denver.
He arrived in Los Angeles in 1903, as an established pictorial artist,
and soon had a job at five dollars a day. He worked for the next
twenty-three years as a commercial artist, primarily painting billboards
as well as a theater scene painter. He also was a significant teacher
of private art classes. His great love, however, was "plein aire"
landscape painting, which he took up full time in 1926.
Easel painting grew quite naturally out of his professional commercial
work. When painting billboards, Puthuff would be transported by
horse-drawn wagon out to a billboard and deposited for the day. When he
and his helpers finished sign painting, they would often set up easels
and sketch and paint while they waited for the return of the wagon.
When Puthuff first came to California he had been mainly interested in
figural painting, but he found this new land so paintable that he
concentrated almost exclusively on landscapes from that time on.
"June Lake"
Oil on board, 12 x 15 inches
SOLD
Shortly after leaving commercial art,
the Santa Fe Railroad offered Puthuff one of his first commissions. He
was asked to paint a series of different views of the Grand Canyon,
which the railroad would use for advertising and promotional purposes.
These works, Grand Canyon, were shown to the public in a 1927
exhibition in the offices of the railroad. They remained there for many
years until their purchase by the Fleischer Museum. Puthuff also
painted backgrounds for the Santa Fe Railroad model train exhibits in
various cities.
Living in La Canada and Corona del Mar, Puthuff painted desert scenes
throughout California and frequently accompanied Edgar Payne on painting
trips to Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. He loved the bright colors and
open space of Navajo country.
In addition to his lyrical landscapes, which he often painted along the
coast south of Los Angeles, in the foothills of the San Gabriel
Mountains, and among the desert buttes of the Southwest, Puthuff was
responsible for the backgrounds of the habitat groups at the Los Angeles
County Museum of History, Science, and Art. This work led to a
commission for Puthuff to paint backgrounds for the Theodore Roosevelt
Memorial in the American Museum of History in New York. After weeks of
work both at Roosevelt's Elk Horn Ranch in North Dakota and in New York,
he completed three panoramic dioramas depicting the ranch.
His work is often considered to be stylistically akin to that of William
Wendt, although with a wider chromatic spectrum. Puthuff is also
particularly identified with the depiction of eucalyptus trees, as are
Jean Mannheim, Dana Bartlett, Edgar Payne, and Anna Althea Hills, and
Paul Lauritz.
In addition to his own artistic achievements, Puthuff was an activist in
the art community. He was partly responsible for the formation of the
two most important artists' organizations of the period, the California
Art Club and the Art Students League of Los Angeles, which he helped
found with Norwegian- born art writer and close friend Antony Anderson,
art critic for the Los Angeles Times. Puthuff had introduced
study from the nude in his private classes in 1903, and in 1906 these
were transferred to the Blanchard building in Los Angeles, and the
school later took the name the Art Students League of Los Angeles.
Southern California
Oil on board, 12 x 15 3/4 inches
SOLD
Call
(800) 833-9185 or email to
info@kargesfineart for further information
He became associated with a group
called the Garvanza Circle, named for the Garvanza district of eastern
Los Angeles, which included such artists as Fernand Lungren, Carl Oscar
Borg, Maynard Dixon, Granville Redmond, Elmer Wachtel, and others who
were inspired by southwestern cultural heritage.
Puthuff's private life spanned two thirty-year long marriages. The
first began in 1910, when he married May Longest, a commercial artist
and co-worker. They had five children, Lee and Duvall, identical twin
boys, and later, Robert, Paul, and Matilda, and the family lived in the
Los Angeles area. After May's death, Puthuff married Louise Ashbridge
White in 1940, a relationship that lasted until his death thirty-two
years later.
He won numerous awards including a Diploma from the Alaska-Yukon
Exposition in 1892 and Silver Medals at the Panama-California Exposition
in 1915. He was a member of numerous clubs, including the California
Art Club, the Laguna Beach Art Association, the Los Angeles Watercolor
Society, the Pasadena Society of Artists, the Salmagundi Club of New
York, the San Francisco Art Association, and the Southern States Art
League.
Hanson Puthuff died May 12, 1972, in Corona del Mar, California.
Sources:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Donald Hagerty, Canyon de Chelly
Wesley Jessup and Jean Stern, Hanson Puthuff, California Colors
Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940
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