ERNEST PEIXOTTO by Deanna Paoli Gumina Printed in The Argonaut: Journal of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, Vol. 23, No. 2, Winter 2012. Permission granted for reproduction by Filoli for use by docents and volunteers.

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ssigned to the 42nd Division of the American Expeditionary Forces as an “official artist,” Ernest Peixotto was appointed to the rank of captain in the Engineer Reserve Corps with orders to exclusively “…make drawings for the War Department.”1 Peixotto was not a career officer, but he came to the attention of the War Department because of his ability to illustrate swiftly and accurately. The Department hoped that his pen-and-ink illustrations would whet the public’s appetite for the visual imagery of war, capturing the pain and death of men locked in battle as well as the destruction of the environs in which they fought. Unlike either the politically sarcastic Punch cartoons of that era or the Bill Mauldin of another world war, who drew farcical cartoons aimed at the plight of mud soaked infantry soldiers, it was through Peixotto’s pen that the reading public would be eyewitness to the tragic slaughter of soldiers and civilians. It was hoped that these images would give the allied victors their bargaining chips when they negotiated the terms of surrender with the Central Powers, thereby ending World War I. Peixotto was forty-eight years old at the time of his induction, and had twenty-five years of professional experience as an illustrator. His work appeared regularly in magazines such as Harper’s and Scribner’s. Peixotto was commissioned by them to illustrate the writings of such notables as VicePresident Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edith Wharton, among others.2 This was in addition to the numerous travel books that he wrote and illustrated as he traveled throughout the United States, Europe, and South America. Talented, articulate,

and fluent in the Romance languages, he was never considered a “starving-in-the-attic artist.” Rather, his skill assured him “of a steady income” even as a young artist fresh out of art school. Academically trained in the impressionist en plein air style, Peixotto was adept as an oil painter and watercolorist, as well as a muralist. His many murals include the ballroom at the Filoli estate in Woodside, California. But it was his illustrations that set him apart from his peers, making him one of the best and highest paid illustrators in the business from the 1890s until his death in the winter of 1940. His illustrations were so precise that architectural firms sought his renderings over those of their own trained draftsmen, a rarity as well as a compliment. His talents and success among illustrators did not go unnoticed by the War Department.3 Peixotto was one of five children, all of whom were successful in their professional lives. His only sister and eldest sibling, Jessica, the second woman to earn a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, became a respected social economist. Peixotto’s older brother Sidney became the head of the Columbia Park Boys’ Club while working in the family business. His older brother Edgar, an able prosecutor in the district attorney’s office, was an active civic promoter and secretary of the California Republican Party. Peixotto’s youngest brother, Eustace, a graduate of the University of California, retired as a brigadier general and served in both world wars. The family-owned textile company had fallen on hard times in the downward spiral of the post-Civil War economy. Rather than face bankruptcy due to the downsizing of the Union Army, their major customer,4 Peixotto’ father Raphael and his partners saw opportunity in San Francisco. 38

Portrait photograph of Ernest Peixotto ca. Feb 28, 1918. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Arnold Genthe Collection.

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factories and quickly sold at auction by art dealers.8 Crazed and feeling devalued by the sudden, unschooled demand for art, some members of the established art community denounced these patrons as “Philistines” who knew nothing about fine art and were ignorant of the sensitive relationship cultivated between patron and artist. This uproar motivated a number of recognized artists to support a local school of the arts. In the spring of 1871, the San Francisco Art Association was established. It promoted “the diffusion of a cultivated taste for art in the community at large, and the establishment of an academy or school of design.” The founding members included some of California’s most talented artists, who had broken away from the pure French Impressionist movement to create the California Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements. These artists’ works focused on the natural beauty of the state’s terrain, flora, and people, evoking emotion through the use of light and color. Meeting at the home of the English watercolorist and soon-to-be first president of the Association, Juan Buckingham Wandesforde, were still-life painter Samuel Marsden Brookes; marine painter Gideon Jacques Denny; landscapist William Keith, whose works rivaled those of Thomas Hill and William Lewis Marple; genre painter Erneste Narjot; Richard Bush; sculptor Pietro Mezzara; critic and editor Benjamin Parke Avery; lithographer and fine book publisher Edward Bosqui; and the mayor of San Francisco, William Alvord. 9 Before the meeting ended, the California School of Design was chartered, becoming the only commercial art school west of the Mississippi with the express mission of training commercial artists and teachers of fine art. They selected landscapist Virgil Macey Williams, known for his disciplined approach to teaching art, as the head of the School, which opened in 1874.10 From the beginning, Williams made it known that the training of young artists was his life’s work. He encouraged many of his students to attend the prestigious Académie Julian or the Ecole des BeauxArts, both located in Paris. Williams modeled the school’s curriculum after the disciplined and reputable programs of the European and East Coast

EARLY LIFE Ernest Clifford Peixotto was born in San Francisco on October 16, 1869, just months after his parents relocated from New York City. As Raphael sailed from New York City around Cape Horn to San Francisco, his wife, Mrytilla, who was expecting Peixotto, took the more expedient and comfortable route by steamship to Panama. In her company were the couple’s young children: Jessica, age 5; Sidney, age 3; and Edgar, age 2.5 The Peixottos came to San Francisco at a fortuitous moment in the city’s history. Silver had been discovered in 1859, a vast unearthing of mineral wealth deep within the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, which would exceed the riches unearthed during the Gold Rush. Known as the Silver Bonanza Decade, 1860 through 1870 was an opulent era that made many of those who invested in the silver stocks instantly wealthy. The discovery of silver was the adrenaline surge that shocked the city and hastened its transformation from a “windblown helter-skelter village teetering on the edge of history” into the metropolis of the Pacific Coast.6 The silver boom redefined the young city’s socioeconomic classes. It emboldened the nouveau riche silver barons, who made it big speculating in the silver stocks as they indulged their desires for gourmet foods, vintage champagnes, exquisite fabrics, luxurious home decor, and private clubs with artifacts that were displayed without regard for expense, taste, or knowledge about fine art. In turn, this moneyed class set the pace for middle class San Franciscans who could afford some of the finer amenities. Together, these two social classes supported the “flowering of art in California that was without precedent on any frontier, making San Francisco the cultural center of the American West.” 7 By the 1870s, oil paintings, watercolors, pen-and-ink sketches, and sculptures were in high demand. To satisfy this desire for fine art, art dealers imported works by the carloads. These works were either reproductions of the old masters, painted by mediocre “copyists,” or outright forgeries—“buckeyes” imported from the East Coast as well as Europe. These cheap and common paintings were massed produced in painting

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art schools, which taught students to draw with mechanical precision before allowing them to even touch a brush. With an undertone of sarcasm, this curriculum was referred to as the “gospel of drawing.” 11 Even though this approach appeared to constrain creativity, it was invaluable training. It forced students to attend to the visual details that separate truly talented artists from those with less talent, known as “copyists.” Through incremental stages, students as the California School of Design learned to draw. They began with the replication of flat objects, which had to be mastered before progressing to round objects. Once the students demonstrated their proficiency replicating these shapes, they were introduced to an assortment of hand or foot casts, which they copied in charcoal, again producing an exact likeness. The final step in the drawing curriculum was full-length figure drawing. It was this controlled precision that would distinguish Peixotto’s future illustrations. Peixotto began at the California School of Design in September of 1886, one month shy of his seventeenth birthday. He was one of the youngest of the 90 students enrolled. Throughout his schooling, he showed a “real talent for writing and art.” Urged by Williams to practice drawing daily, Peixotto slipped into the Presidio of San Francisco, where he sat atop a knoll and sketched “people in motion set against the tall eucalyptus trees and grand vista of the Bay.” 12 The Presidio was the headquarters of the United States Army and offered a number of settings for the young art student to draw. Peixotto often drew there in the company of another student who attended the California School of Design—Frank Norris, the future novelist. The two friends “sat in the grass” close to the Cavalry Barracks, where they observed and drew “Army trainers [moving] the trim horses through their paces,” all the while attempting to catch the movement of the horses’ heads, knee joints, and flexible fetlocks.13 These meetings solidified the bond of friendship between the chatty Peixotto and the witty Norris—a friendship that lasted until Norris’s death in 1902. At the end of the winter semester, Norris left San Francisco for Paris to study oil painting at the

Ernest Clifford Peixotto in the early 1890s. Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto

famed Académie Julian. It would be another year before the two students rekindled their friendship in Paris. Peixotto continued his studies at the California School of Design. Unexpectedly, over the semester break, Williams died on December 18, 1886, the victim of a heart attack. Although Williams was the head teacher of the California School of Design, his influence on Peixotto’s career is unknown. Peixotto does not mention either him or his successor, Raymond Debb Yelland, in his letters or papers. It was their successor, Soren Emil Carlsen,14 who recognized Peixotto’s talent. The young student remembered Carlsen as a “strong and affective teacher” to whom he felt that he owed “a debt of gratitude for putting” him on the “right track” leading him to the Académie Julian.15 Eighteen months after enrolling at the California School of Design, Peixotto was studying in Paris with his expenses “underwritten by four of his uncles and his older brother [Sidney]…” who provided him with $625 a year for three years.16

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friends with the George Anisley Davis family, a tie that did not end when Daniel and his family returned to New York City in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837. Within two years of their return to New York City, Daniel died of consumption at the age of 43, leaving his family of seven children nearly impoverished. Shouldering the family’s finances fell to the oldest daughter, Judith, who became a teacher and then the principal of the Female Evening School. Following in her footsteps were her two sisters, Sara Naar and Zipporah. Their brothers Moses, Benjamin, and Raphael, ages thirteen, ten, and six respectively, were sent to live with the Davises in Cleveland, Ohio, where they learned the wholesale and retail merchandising of garments. Raphael became a full partner in the business with his marriage to Davis’s only daughter, Mrytilla.21 From this Midwest base, Davis, Peixotto & Company aggressively advertised “superior clothing at rates equal to any house in the Union including gentlemen’s furnishings, rubber goods and life preservers.” They were not to be undersold and encouraged “country merchants” to “examine” their “stock and prices before purchasing East or elsewhere.” After the Civil War, the brothers and George returned to New York City, having sold their interest in the business to Raphael, Benjamin, and their oldest brother Moses, a former captain in the Union Army. 22

FAMILY BACKGROUND The Peixottos were survivors. As Sephardic Jews, they traced their ancestral roots to Spain and then to Portugal before the family was expelled from the Iberian Peninsula by the royal edict of 1492, the same year Christopher Columbus’s expedition set sail to discover a trade route to the Indies. This edict, proclaimed by the youthful monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, ushered in the reign of terror. The resulting Inquisition required Jews to either convert to Catholicism, becoming the despised conversos, or be burned in ovens as heretics. It must have seemed cruelly ironic to those in the harbor of Palos, Spain, that Columbus’s caravel was moored alongside the ships that carried into exile Spain’s Jews.17 Rather than submit to these dictates, the Peixottos joined the fleeing exodus, seeking exile wherever it could be found. By 1699 some members of the family had found safety in Amsterdam, while others ventured to the Dutch Indies island of Curacao. From Curacao, Peixotto’s great-grandfather Moses immigrated to New York City in the summer of 1807. A merchant on Front Street, he became a trustee of his synagogue before giving up his business to become the congregation’s full-time hazzan. He served the Portuguese congregation of Shearith Israel for six years, until his death.18 This religious devotion to Judaism was not as deeply rooted in either Peixotto or his siblings, as they seemed free to explore their spirituality in their own ways.19 Nonetheless, in the winter of 1893, Peixotto took time from his art studies to make a pilgrimage to Amsterdam’s Jewish sector and synagogue, rekindling a relationship with Moses. Moses’s son Daniel became a well-respected physician in New York City. He was offered a professorship at the newly founded Willoughby University Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1835. Daniel was the first Jew to teach and practice medicine in Ohio and the first Jew to become the president of the college, which later merged into Case Western Reserve University Medical School. 20 In the closely knit Cleveland Jewish community, Daniel and his family became close

STUDYING IN FRANCE On October 17 the young Peixotto sailed for France on the German Saale, and as soon as he arrived in Paris, he immersed himself in the Académie’s departments, known as the Ateliers de Peinture, Sculpteur et Dessin, which Peixotto referred to as the “Trilby.” The charm of Paris captivated the young San Franciscan, who already spoke the language, and he quickly absorbed the French lifestyle. In his book Through the French Provinces, published in 1910, he wrote that he had gone to “study in France” when he was “as a mere boy” and that the “country and its picturesque towns and villages took a strong hold upon” him.

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Ernest Peixotto in his Paris studio with painting Dans l'Eglise (“In the Church”). Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto.

His fondness for Paris and the French provinces seized him as a young student and grew “with the years” as he unfolded “new riches” and an “inexhaustible mine of interest” that shaped his career.23 This attachment to France would remain a lifelong passion, and it proved invaluable during World War I, the experience that redirected his career from illustrator to atelier to muralist. A student again, Peixotto met up with the flamboyant Norris. The two friends sketched lances, buckles, and suits of mail at the Artillery Museum in the Hôtel des Invalides. These military artifacts inspired Norris to begin painting an ambitious work documenting the Hundred Years’ War Battle

of Crécy. Norris began this work on an oversized canvas, an extravagant expense for any student on an allowance. Crécy, a Norman village about thirty miles northeast of Paris along the Brie River, became Peixotto’s favorite spot for drawing. He invited his fellow artist Guy Rose to join him here to sketch the “walled town.”24 It was in Crécy that Peixotto painted his prized painting, Dans l’Eglise, which he was later invited to exhibit at the Paris Salon in 1891.25 Unlike Peixotto, Norris never finished his ambitious project. Losing interest in the painting, he offered the oversized canvas to both Peixotto and

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Rose as he turned his attention to the writing of medieval romances. 26 Decades later, Peixotto recalled his appreciation for this “extraordinary” gift, and although he never said what he did with the canvas, the time spent with Norris at the Artillery Museum was instructive. For hours, he observed and drew military artifacts, committing to memory the intricate visual details that he recalled with precise accuracy. Over the years, this kind of practice enabled him to commit to visual memory the replication of exact details that would figure importantly in his future mural works.

Bellevue, France. The Académie was founded in 1873 as a congerie of studios by Rudolphe Julian, an ex-prize fighter who posed as a model but was an untalented painter himself. Over the years, the number of distinguished visiting professors increased the reputation of the Académie, attracting a cadre of American artists. It became the alternative to the French government’s schools. In contrast to the strictly run ecoles, all of which required a demonstrated level of technical proficiency and the passing of a rigorous entrance examination that focused on history and other academic subjects, the Académie was loosely governed. Students were charged a nominal enrollment fee, and although they worked under the supervision of a master, they freely moved to other studios, engaging professors for instruction. At the Académie there were no entrance examinations, age limitations, or restriction as to how long one worked in the studio. The Ecole closed in the afternoons, whereas the Académie studios remained open until the afternoon sky had darkened.31 The faculties of both the governmentsponsored Ecole and the Académie were well respected members of the Parsienne art community. Through their influence, their students’ works had an advantage in being selected for exhibition at the salons. Those American artists who were fortunate to study under a recognized French master and to receive an honorable mention or, greater yet, a medal from the salon, earned lifelong recognition of their artistic abilities. This recognition commanded the same respect that would have been accorded to a French artist. 32 Some American artists equated it with being given French citizenship. Preparing to exhibit in the salon was a highly competitive event that required persistence, hard work, and, of course, money. Exhibitors worked under veiled secrecy in an attempt to protect their works, fearful that their idea or interpretation of a subject might be stolen by an unscrupulous competitor. Nonetheless, they keenly sought out the subjects that had caught the judges’ eyes as a potential prize contender. Every step in this process was costly. Models were hired. Materials and sup-

ACADÉMIE JULIEN The next ten years, from 1888 to 1898, were Peixotto’s apprenticeship years. He traveled regularly between San Francisco and Paris, exhibiting his works in both cities. He gained national and international recognition as a promising artist. He attended the Académie incrementally, from 1888–1890 and again from 1891–1893, studying under the watchful supervision of Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant, Jules Lefebvre, Lucien Doucet, and Jean-Paul Laurens–his master teachers who had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.27 Under their tutelage, Peixotto learned to refine his drafting skills, use brilliant color, and understand how the complexity of lighting affected his subjects.28 He remarked that he felt privileged “visiting the studio of Benjamin Constant” and never felt rebuked by, or took personal offense to, any “criticism” of his work by the master—a rare quality for a young man. Instead, commented Peixotto, any criticisms given by either Constant or LeFebvre were “craved very ardently by many students in Paris.” During the winter months at the Académie, Peixotto sketched and painted live models. During the summers he became “a regular” at Giverny.29 When Peixotto enrolled at the Académie, it was known as the “feeder” school for L’Ecole des BeauxArts. The Académie was where many artists and architects learned specialties guided by a master.30 The training was so specific that many of those who completed the course of study qualified as arteliers, a post that Peixotto held during his Army career, especially during his tour of duty at

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Académie Julian class, ca. 1890. Unidentified photographer. Courtesy of Henry Ossawa Tanner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Cauldwell before it was submitted to the Paris salon. The painting was accepted at the salon for exhibition, and with this news Peixotto received an “exhibitor’s ticket” to see the other works on “Varnishing Day.”35 Later this painting would be exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The following year, in 1891, Peixotto was invited to exhibit again and he chose Dans l’Eglise. The painting depicted a small number of women in the village of Crécy, kneeling in prayer, scattered about a white plaster church that was dimly lit. It was the manner in which the light fell on the sparsely dotted figures that gave Dans l’Eglise the feeling of sentimental reverence. This painting gained him recognition as one of the pieces that held “a place on the line.” Gaining “a place on the line” meant that one’s work was “at eye level,” an advantageous

plies were purchased at great expense. Draymen, who charged by the hour, were contracted to carefully transport the artworks, and lastly, an entrance fee was required.33 These expenses were in addition to the rental of a studio, and if need be, an apartment that provided room and board. Peixotto would be invited to exhibit at the Paris Salon in 1890, 1891, 1895, and 1905. His 1890 and 1891 exhibits would be exhibited at the Society of American Artists in New York. During the winter months of 1890, Peixotto was preparing to enter the salon competition in March. This was his first experience in the salon competition, and he presented an oil painting titled Devant la Cheminee /Le Vieux Garde de Chase. It portrayed an elderly man warming himself before a fire.34 It was shown at the Paris studio of Mr. Leslie Giffen

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placement for any painting, given that the paintings were hung in rows from this first line to the ceiling. Pleased with this accomplishment, he viewed its placement on Varnishing Day. “It shows,” he wrote modestly, “that I have profited to some extent by my stay in Paris.”36 The following year, 1892, Peixotto and his Dans l’Eglise returned to San Francisco, where it was promptly exhibited at the prestigious Vickery’s Gallery. Even before his arrival in San Francisco, the city’s art critics heralded his success, telling their readers that his use of “full light” was “unparalleled.” It filled the “simple” scene of figures kneeling in prayer with a sense of spiritual “repose.” 37 Peixotto gave new light to the Impresssionist style. Proudly, William Kengston Vickery, the city’s art impresario and promoter, who owned the exclusive Post Street art gallery in the heart of San Francisco’s downtown retail district, exhibited the painting. This was a plum for Vickery, who wasted little expense in reminding the public that the twenty-two-year-old Peixotto had “exhibited in the Paris Salons of 1890 and 1891.”38 Over the years, Vickery built his reputation on being the first art dealer to exhibit the paintings of California’s growing number of young Impressionist expatriates. On the heels of this recognition, Peixotto went on a working holiday, producing a number of works, including his painting of an elderly Dutch woman, Femme de Rijsoord. Drawn to the Dutch masters, Peixotto went to the artist’s colony in Rijsoord in the southern Netherlands, where he found the inspirational muse that he felt was lacking at Giverny. His model was a “woman of about twenty-six” possessing “a finely chiseled head, with eyes that looked right out into nothing…. [and whose] skin was pale.” A somber piece, this Dutch Madonna won him the coveted Mention Honorable at the 1895 salon. With this award, San Francisco art critics now heralded him as an “artistic genius” who was the second student from the California School of Design to win such an accolade. Femme de Rijsoord would be sent to the National Academy in New York City and afterwards would be the only painting that remained in Peixotto’s personal possession.39

Back in San Francisco, Peixotto looked for work among art minded San Franciscans who might seek his academic training as a portrait painter. Instead, he found the opposite and bitterly exclaimed that, “The city is so backward in an artistic way that artists, in as much they must eat to live, are compelled to do other work which will bring in immediate return.” He rented a studio apartment at 420 Montgomery Street, joining a small group of artists and writers, and vowed that he would not become a “starving artist” but one who would earn his way in the world. He painted drop curtains at the Tivoli Theatre, a large panorama of Yosemite for C. D. Robinson, and taught pen-and-ink drawing courses at the San Francisco School of Art. The Overland Monthly hired him to illustrate articles as did his friend, Frank Norris, who asked him to illustrate his story The Jongleur of Tailiebois in the Christmas issue of The Wave.40 Robert Louis Stevenson asked him to illustrate a series of his letters. Eager to paint en plein air, Peixotto packed his easel and umbrella and went on “sketching trips” to the rural community of St. Helena, north of San Francisco, where he worked on small canvases for upcoming exhibits. Some of these pen-and-ink sketches were exhibited at the State Fair in Sacramento. The art critic for the Sacramento Bee described them as “perfect gems” that reflected Peixotto’s realism and his “fidelity to nature,” winning for him a silver medal at the State Fair. Next, he packed three drawings: Garden at Santa Barbara, Old Bridge Verona Italy, and Doorway Paris and sent them to the Western Authors and Artists Club in Kansas City for their late May exhibition. Pleased, the club awarded him an honorary membership. He was feted at a lavish dinner at the Palace Hotel and proclaimed by the San Francisco Argonaut as “one of the rising young artists” on the scene. Afterward, he gave several of his Giverny paintings to the exhibition hosted by the Guild of Arts and Crafts and left some others to be hung at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, a club that he joined in April.41 The following year, 1893, Peixotto sent a number of his black and white drawings to the famed Chicago Art Institute, hosted by the Chicago Society of

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Artists. The art critic for The Chicago Post described his pen-and-ink drawings as possessing “exquisite brightness and delicacy. He treats the sunny South as it should be treated, emphasizing its clear and lambent atmosphere, its quaint witchery charm.” 42 This Chicago exhibition was the beginning of his promotion among the up-and-coming young illustrators on the national scene. Back in California, Peixotto’s oil painting Clearing by a Willow, San Rafael received praise from William South, art historian, who complimented Peixotto’s use of the “principles of Impressionism” with his use of bright color, light, and the broken brush strokes. The painting, completed when Peixotto was an instructor at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, was probably, continIllustration of “The New San Francisco Water Front.” Reproduced from The Overland Monthly, Vol. XIX (Second Series), 1892. ued South, “the closest available approximation of his Giverny work” reflecting the use of fluid in the hopes of finding a suitable subject that he “brushwork” that focused “on the sun-dappled path could enter for the 1894 Salon. He eventually subshrouded by trees.” For South, the painting mitted one of his drawings in the Concours des “bespeaks a keen interest in the quickly tranQuarte Semaines, which was held at the Atelier of scribed effects of light and shadow.” Had Peixotto Laurens and Benjamin Constant in January 1894. remained in California, wrote South, “ his work His drawing was awarded a “First Mention.” would have played an important part in the develPleased, he went to Rouen but he felt that he had opment of impressionistic painting in Northern 43 lost his inspirational muse. However, his muse was California.” about to appear. By Christmas Day 1893, Peixotto returned to the Less than a week after his return from Rouen, Académie Julian to work under Jean Paul Laurens

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three American ladies registered at the Hôtel Baudy. One of the women was the Oakland-born, twenty-eight-year-old Mary Glascock Hutchinson, otherwise known as “Mollie,” who was studying in Paris attending the Atelier Delecluse. Peixotto and Mollie had known each other in San Francisco as she had also been a student of Emil Carlsen at the California School of Design and had previously stayed at Giverny. But it was in Paris that their romance blossomed. 44 For several weeks, they enjoyed Paris together before Peixotto left for a prearranged pilgrimage to honor his ancestors at the Portuguese Synagogue in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. Mollie remained in Paris to study before leaving for Giverny. From Amsterdam, Peixotto returned to Paris, taking the evening train to Giverny, beating the “Arrival of the girls” to the Hôtel Baudy. Once there, he caught his breathe, writing in exclamatory fashion, “… Miss H. Arrived!” Together, they explored the countryside with side trips, returning to Giverny to celebrate Peixotto’s twenty-fifth birthday. Three years later, Peixotto and Mollie married on January 28, 1897 in New Orleans at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Although both wanted to return to San Francisco to marry in the presence of their families, time and geography thwarted their plans. Peixotto had been commissioned by Scribner’s to draw the new Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., an assignment that made it impossible for him to travel to California if he was to meet the publisher’s June deadline. A trip East would have been a hardship on his family, and Mollie had family in Natchez. The couple compromised, settling on New Orleans as the site of their wedding.

Mary Peixotto. Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto.

Peixotto’s first visit to the Giverny art community was in September of 1889. He stayed at the Hôtel Baudy, run by the proprietoress Mme. Angelina Baudy, who was “an agreeable landlady.” Her inn was popular with the American expatriates. During the day, Peixotto took day trips as he “explored every nook of this pretty bit of countryside…in all forms of conveyance—bicycle, motor car, and in an open carriage,” gaining intimacy with the countryside. Between 1889 and 1895, Peixotto stayed at the inn five times. Aside from the hotel’s register, the only record of his time at Giverny is the small tonalist charcoal pencil on paper drawing he composed and entitled Giverny 1891 presently on deposit at the University of California’s Bancroft Library.

GIVERNY Between his studies at the Académie and preparation for the salon exhibits, Peixotto joined the colony of expatriate artists who stayed at Giverny, both in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the master Claude Monet at work and of perfecting their own Impressionist styles. Fellow Californian Guy Rose described Giverny as a quiet village with inexpensive accommodations and plenty of recreational diversions.

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It was among the gardens and the water ponds (which were a continual inspiration for Monet) that Peixotto’s identification with the Impressionist movement solidified. Pleased with the atmosphere at Giverny, Peixotto, along with others, entreated another classmate from the California School of Design, the lovely Evelyn McCormick, to join them. In 1892, the vivacious and petite McCormick, a bon vivant, became the “belle of the ball,” enlivening the gatherings of the “Giverny Group.” However, this was before the arrival of his beloved Mollie. And keeping tabs on all of them was the art critic for the San Francisco Wave, a chatty daily that reported a “continual stream” of news about the city’s art students in Paris.45 A frequent visitor to Giverny was Robert, the son of San Francisco’s art impresario, William Kengston Vickery, who was sent to check on the progress of the artists and extend an invitation to the most promising to exhibit at his father’s swank gallery. In 1893 he exhibited a collection of thirtyfive pieces, including oils, pastels, and black and white drawings that Peixotto had created in France, Italy, and California. Vickery exhibited a “trio of pastels” of the French countryside that was described as “delicate as a dream” and “poetic as a lyric of Keats.” Peixotto’s drawing of certain scenes was deemed “clever” but it was his “well developed” color sense that attracted the attention of the reviewer.46 Two years later, in September 1895, Peixotto met with equal success exhibiting a number of works at Vickerey’s that included oils, pastels, black-andwhites, and the Woman of Rijsoord. This exhibition, deemed a financial success, praised Peixotto as “the most brilliant” from among California’s budding artists and immediately increased his worth as a portrait painter. He was to have “shown a distinct personality” within the Impressionist school, commented the art critic who again recognized Peixotto’s “broad” use of color, as he “followed his own impressions of light, shadow, and atmosphere.” It was the use of light and color in these canvases that engendered emotion in the viewer. In an “attractive study” of a “French peasant woman… washing clothes over a creek,” Peixotto’s portrayal

Pencil sketch by the well-known artist Alphonse Legros of William Kingston Vickery. Made in 1891 when Vickery was 40. Courtesy of the Vickery family archives.

of sunlight radiated “warmth and brilliancy” and was considered a testimony to his ability to handle out-door effects painting en plein air. The painting Morning Mist in April, which was considered among the most charming of all the canvasses exhibited, was a picture of a little French town dimly seen through the haze of dawn with the signs of an early spring blossoming in the foreground. Another painting, Sunset Glow, done in reds and yellows and painted with a full light effect, admirably blended the vibrancy of the colors with the precision of details. Peixotto had trained his eye to capture light and in some way, he expected that his viewing audience would appreciate his attention to the effect of sunlight. His idea was, he wrote, “to paint what I see and all the emotions raised in my soul by a

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grand landscape I try, by means of the brush, to reproduce in the onlooker at the finished picture. Let me illustrate. If a gorgeous bit of sunlight appeals to me…that being the predominating characteristic of nature’s painting, I consider the artist perfectly in order when he sacrifices drawing, composition and tone to get the requisite effect of sunlight.” The artist, in his opinion, was obligated to “convey an idea or story” in the work and cautioned that a painting may not “immediately please the viewer” but the “fault lies not in the picture…but in themselves” [because] “The eye…had been quite untrained.” Vickery’s presented its third exhibition of Peixotto’s works in October 1896. It consisted mostly of “some fifty” or so of his “original drawings,” most of which were “oil paintings and sketches in oil, pastel and pen-and-ink.” An art critic’s summation was, “A good showing, surely!” The critic ended his remarks writing, “There are few artists in California whose works would sell as readily” and when the show was over, “nearly all [of the paintings had] been sold.” Peixotto’s last exhibition was in February 1903, after the gallery had become Vickery, Atkins and Torrey and had moved to 236 Post Street. The gallery presented fifty of his recent works, which included a collection of oil paintings and black and whites done in various locations throughout France, England, Malta, and Italy. On loan from Mrs. Phoebe Hearst was Peixotto’s prize painting, Lady in Yellow, with the lady being modeled by his beloved, Mollie. The painting was considered to be his most ambitious work and had won him an Honorable Mention at the Paris Salon of 1901.47

Vickery Atkins & Torrey at its temporary location on 1744 California Street after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Courtesy of the Vickery family archives.

The Montgomery Block became the citadel of Bohemia, a haven for artists and writers whose rollicking antics gave this coveted office site in the heart of the city’s financial district the nickname “Monkey Block.”49 Once the most luxurious office building on the Pacific Coast, the Montgomery Block was now a run-down building that offered cheap rents to artists and writers. Attractive amenities included steam baths in the basement and the popular ground floor Italian trattoria of Pappa Coppa, who served hearty foods and cheap burgundy. Sitting around their designated central table at Pappa Coppa’s, these talented and overly confident young artists formed their own confraternity, calling themselves “Les Jeunes.” They composed a counter-establishment group of young, gifted intellectuals who espoused a three-part “active revolt” against: 1) “the ‘horrors’ of the Victorian lifestyle and design” as they knew it; 2) the “autocratic editors of the elite” with their “commonplace” magazines; and 3) the philistine mentality of the nouveau riche. They paid allegiance to the fictitious country they called Bohemia as they raised their wine glasses in merry toasts. Those who could not

PHILISTINES In 1893, Peixotto rented a small studio on Sacramento Street close to the famed Montgomery Block building. The space had been vacated by the talented but temperamental architect Willis Polk and adjoined the studios of the painters Amadie Joullin and Charles Rollo Peters, both of whom had studied at the California School of Design as well as the Académie Julian and L’Ecole des Beaux Arts.48

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pay the bill of fare struck a reciprocal deal with Pappa Coppa, who, despite the popularity of his eatery, could not afford to renovate his restaurant. Agreeing to have the artists decorate the establishment in their chosen medium, the restaurant’s walls were soon filled with artwork. Porter Garnett took to the ceiling creating a “worm’s eye view” of the dining room.”50 Xavier Martinez created a frieze of black cats that ran around the room and Gelett Burgess drew train trestles. Others created murals that were “enviable iconoclasts’ pot-shots” at the Philistines and anyone else who disagreed with their view. On the walls, Burgess also created a “Map of Bohemia” that had originally appeared in The Lark. “Bohemia,” they imagined, was flanked on one side by Philistia with Vanitas as its capital and on the opposite side by Licentia with its forbidding castle Crudelitas close to the border. The Delectable Islands lay off the coast to the north, while only Vagabondia separated Bohemia from the Great Philistine Desert to the south.”51 “Les Jeunes” from The Lark: Frank Burgess, Ernest Peixotto, Bruce Porter, In this hedonist ambience, the and Willis Polk. Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto. young artists heatedly bemoaned the unsophisticated tastes of the philistines, to whom they referred as The bickering between the artists and these var“cretin idiots.” The artists heaped blame on the ious contingencies became heated exchanges. “cretins” for making their professional lives Artists fussed that the art committees assigned to “unbearable” with their “rule.” They referred to display their paintings at various shows ignored criticism by this moneyed class as the “wrath of the 52 requests by the artists. Peixotto avoided the cross Philistines.” Full of themselves and heavy red fire of one such hanging committee when he hung wine, these artists primarily blamed wealthy some of his Giverny landscapes. Rather than let patrons, the art dealers who sold to them, and the the committee dictate where his works would be San Francisco Art Association who catered to placed, he quickly and quietly hung his works them as the reason for leaving San Francisco for where each would maximize the gallery’s natural New York City. The arrogant young artists expect“light” and décor to his taste. The squabbling coned that, by virtue of their talent alone, the East tinued between the members of the San Francisco Coast arts community would welcome them withArt Association, who reputedly demonstrated their out question. In the East, the artists believed that “prejudices” in favor of their own interpretative they would not experience any of the criticism of school of thinking, and the joint forces of the art their work that they had endured in San Francisco.

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students and their instructors, who felt disenfranchised by the Art Association. Ever the diplomat, Peixotto, in his role as the Saturday art instructor at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, offered a solution: the creation of a “proper art gallery” where both pupils and teachers could exhibit their works and exchange ideas.53 Fresh from his experience at the Paris Salons, he held that, “In the Old World a pupil may be directed to a certain gallery for the purpose of studying some particular picture. It is studied carefully until the idea that the painter sought to convey is fairly grasped and somewhat of his method understood. You can not do that here,” he said. “One can only explain, explain, explain all the time. One painting is worth a volume of exposition. It is not so satisfactory to the pupil, and the artist has the strength that he ought to be putting into good studio work frittered away far too frequently on pupils who have taken up painting as a fad.” He then concluded apologetically, “Don’t imagine that I am decrying the talent lying dormant right here in the city. The Art School is a grand thing and I have every reason to speak well of it; and moreover, it is I believe, being carried on in the right direction.” Although Peixotto was considered “among the best” of the young artists, the in-fighting threatened an upcoming exhibit in which he was to present the “delightful” oil portrait of “Miss Lewis,” which he had painted in New Haven, Connecticut. This oil painting was of a blonde girl with a quaint puritan face wearing a dark cloak against a dull background.54 The newspaper art critic regarded his exclusion as “regrettable” and “unfortunate.” Fanning these contentious fires were the art columnists of the city’s various newspapers. Eager to beat each other to the scoop about the various cliques that threatened to ruin even the most modest shows, they reported the comings and goings of individual artists in such foreboding tones it seem as though their departures for the East were immanent. In September 1893, the reporter for the San Francisco Call wrote that Peixotto planned to leave by mid-October. Somberly, the critic told his readership that “one by one San Francisco’s galaxy of artistic stars are

departing for foreign climes,” and “at this rate only a ‘corporal’s guard’ of artists would remain” in San Francisco. 55 Actually, Peixotto was returning to Paris to continue his studies at the Académie Julian as well as to study in Florence, Milan, Rome, and Venice. Lamenting, the reporter went on, “It will probably be several years before he is seen here again.” This was not the first time that the city’s art critics feared Peixotto’s permanent departure. His final departure was still far in the future. Peixotto left San Francisco on October 10, 1893, in the company of Louis Sloss and Albert Pissis, the architect who designed the Beaux Arts Hibernia Bank. First they headed to the East. When Peixotto arrived in New York, he went to the Scribner’s office, where he was commissioned to draw twelve pen-and-ink drawings of prominent New York City office buildings, a commission that he completed in sixteen days. The drawings were used to illustrate two articles written by A. Ferree: Tall Buildings in New York and High Buildings and Its Art [sic], both published in March 1894. Promptly paid, Peixotto immediately booked passage on the French mail steamer La Bertagne and sailed for Paris on December 2, 1893, to continue his studies.56 Two years later, on June 15, the columnist for the Wave announced that Peixotto would soon return to San Francisco with an “admirable” collection of pen-and-ink works.57 Continuing in a melodramatic tone, the critic announced that Peixotto’s return was “delayed” and, so as not to sound alarmist, the art critic added that this was not a “dangerous” sign. The critic explained that the “young artist…found appreciation in the New York offices of Century magazine” and had also been in Boston where he was “hard at work on 10 full page pictures and illustration of street life in Boston” for Scribner’s. He had also completed drawings of the Boston Public Library, which the publisher was so pleased with he compared Peixotto’s style to that of the leading illustrator, Joseph Pennell. Eager to return to San Francisco, Peixotto had sent a personal note to the reporter assuring him that he “may be back here any day”—a term, wrote the art critic, that has “all the elastic properties of the marrow that never comes.” On July 10, The Wave reported with excitement that Peixotto had

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not only returned to San Francisco, but was the “guest of honor at a round table at the Bohemian Club,” having “distinguished himself in Europe.” The art critic correctly sensed that San Francisco did not offer the artistic ambience of the East Coast, and that it was only a matter of time before the talented Peixotto would permanently relocate to New York City. In October of 1896, it was reported that Peixotto was “leaving San Francisco for a more inspiring art atmosphere in New York,” having “longed weighed California in the artistic balance and found it wanting.” Softening Peixotto’s departure by describing it as a “flitting” east, the columnist wrote that Peixotto was “packing his easel and closing his umbrella.” However, the columnist concluded by saying that Peixotto had promised San Franciscans that he would go no further than New York City and the illustration rooms of Scribner’s and Harper’s.

THE LARK AND “LES JEUNES” Peixotto’s “flitting” east was the New York Buildings by Ernest C. Peixotto. Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto. subject of his illustration titled Le Retour de L’Impressioniste, a penWith its off-beat literary style, The Lark and-ink depiction of a painter carrying his easel appealed to a limited readership. The contributors, and walking off a path and through a field. mostly writers and artists who critiqued each Commissioned by Gelett Burgess, the editor of the other’s works, voiced sentiments that were either new avant-garde magazine The Lark, Peixotto “good-naturedly or bitterly critical of one designed and drew the front cover for the inauguanother.”59 It was an “independent venture, more ral issue of September 1895. The illustration was in fun than earnest” and was published by William “based on a drawing composed of tiny circles 58 Doxey, an English-born bookseller and publisher, meant to simulate the impressionist technique.” whose Market Street bookstore was the gathering In all, Peixotto created fifteen illustrations for The place for the city’s fin-de-siecle authors and artists. Lark, thereby maintaining his foothold in the city’s Recognizing the talent of these artists and writers, local art community.

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exploration in search of a short-cut to Fame” for many of the magazine’s contributing artists and writers.61 The inspiration for The Lark was Gelett Burgess, a Bostonian, who had studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He came to San Francisco to work as a draftsman for Southern Pacific Railroad and taught topographical drawing at the University of California. A born humorist and clever with words, Burgess quickly immersed himself into the bohemian life of San Francisco and eventually wrote and illustrated a number of popular works that were amusing and light-hearted. 62 Some members of “Les Jeunes” were also members of the Bohemian Club, who “met first at Camp Ha-Ha” during an encampment at the Bohemian Grove before transferring their activities to Coppa’s restaurant. Between October 1895 when the first issue of The Lark was published and April 1897 when it ceased publication, Burgess edited the magazine. He oversaw the contributions made by “Les Jeunes.” He also wrote his own poem, “Purple Cow,” which was regarded as a witty satire on the art movement and is credited with the creation of the fanciful “Goops.” The Goops, those boneless, quasi-human creatures who writhed about in what he called “a cotangent harmonious loop,” were remembered by Peixotto’s youngest brother Eustace, who was born the year after Peixotto entered art school. The eightyear-old Eustace remembered that Burgess came regularly to the Peixotto’s Sutter Street home to call on their sister, Jessica, who was a student at the University of California. These visits were special events in young Eustace’s life. During Burgess’s visits, Eustace was allowed him to “eat with the grown ups,” a privilege for children in the Victorian era. It was during these dinners that Burgess and Eustace’s oldest brother Sidney entertained him with stories about the creatures that lived in Goopville. According to Eustace, Burgess was not the creator of the Goops. Eustace claimed that it was his oldest brother Sidney who told stories about the imaginary Goops, which he described as “skeletons who lived on an island.” This description is in contrast to the Goop stories told by Burgess, in which he described “gelantious” Goops that

Frank Gelett Burgess, circa 1910. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library Portrait Collection.

Doxey was willing to risk his business by giving them a safe haven to voice their egocentric, opinionated, and self-promoting views as representatives of “the new Western impulse–standing for ingenuousness, freedom, and freshness of life.” Under Doxey’s auspices, “Les Jeunes” enjoyed a genteel atmosphere that allowed them to vent; at the same time, Doxey attracted the moneyed residents of Nob Hill and the Western Addition, who were among his clientele. The Lark was governed by a policy of optimism that was “frolic, pure and simple,” with the intended mission to irritate the philistines. It was rumored that the local San Francisco magazine distributors refused to handle it, while others consigned it to the table drawer in a faraway corner of the library.60 However, The Lark was considered a “most delightful little magazine” among the trendy “miniature periodicals” for its freshness and lack of pretention. It also promoted a “wild, hap-hazard

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lived in Goopville—stories told to describe the antics of naughty children. In the end, it was Burgess’s version that was introduced to “Les Jeunes” as representative of philistine thinking. In one photograph the members of “Les Jeunes” were dressed in child-like garb, portraying themselves as “Goop Dolls.”63 Eighteen months after its literary debut, The Lark ceased publication, stating in its final April 1897 issue that “having fulfilled its mission…its work has been done…. It has made its pages known in the East as no California publication has ever been known before—it has stood for the reaction against decadence—and prophesized the renaissance.” Doxey told his readers that the members of “Les Jeunes” “…have dispersed, for there is more serious work to be done. But their little

Illustration for The Lark. Ernest Peixotto's placard for The Lark’s little magazine parody, Le Petit Journal des Refusees, ca. 1897.

straw-colored pamphlet will not be soon forgotten.” Before their disbursement, they published one last journal titled Le Petit Journal des Refusees, a take-off on the French Salon des Refusees. Printed on black paper with yellow ink, Peixotto designed the poster that accompanied the final edition of The Lark.64 Their adolescence over, the members of “Les Jeunes” went their separate ways, knowing that their “…mood was too spontaneous, or rather too enthusiastic, to last,” for each “had dwelt over-long with gayety; there was the world’s sober work to do.” Bidding his own farewell to “Les Jeunes’” talented, highly spirited, and outrageous narcissistic foolery, Burgess left the offices of The Lark and joined the Wave, where he took over the editing and writing work of Frank Norris. Bruce Porter pursued landscape design, the painting of murals, and the creation of stained glass windows. Willis Polk concentrated on his architectural career.65 Maynard Dixon painted the American southwest, and illustrator Florence Lundborg took over from Peixotto, who had already relocated to New York City.

The Goops characters debuted, conceptually, in the illustrations of Burgess' publication, The Lark, in the late 19th century. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

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Austin Abbey, A. B. Frost, Charles Dana Gibson, Frederic Remington, and Howard Pyle. Publishers of this era set a high standard for the quality of the art that appeared in their publications. At one time or another, nearly all of America’s best painters provided illustrations for these magazines, a privileged recognition of their talent. Aside from the Overland Monthly, which rested on laurels gained through the writings of its former editor, Bret Harte, San Francisco lacked opportunities for this caliber of work to flourish. At best, the Overland boasted that more beginners had graduated from its columns to the New York magazines and newspapers than from any other publication in the country. 68 Compared to the Eastern journals, Peixotto complained that the illustrations being published by the Overland Monthly were “inferior.” By the beginning of the decade, Peixotto had relinquished any hope that the Overland, which had published a number of his sketches, would “take a rank among the very first in illustration.” Peixotto knew that if he was to be successful he needed to base himself in the East. In addition to the illustrations published by the Overland, Peixotto had been doing a “good deal of illustrating for the State textbooks” as well as for the San Francisco Post and the Morning Call, but this exposure was not sufficient to either sustain or promote his career.69 Peixotto was spending long months dividing his time between San Francisco and New York City and was earning the reputation of being a “thorough” and “strictly authentic” illustrator who “never left” any detail to “guess work.” His demand for authenticity was so compelling that he visited each scene he was commissioned to illustrate to ensure that his work was “historically correct.” Reading the writings of Bret Harte, Peixotto realized that Bret Harte did not visit the locales of the mines that he featured in his stories, commenting that, “The mines that Bret Harte knew best and in fact the only ones he did know, except those in Trinity County, were what Californians call the Southern Mines, situated along the Stanislaus River, east of San Francisco.” In the November 1903 issue of Scribner’s, Peixotto’s illus-

PEIXOTTO THE ILLUSTRATOR Peixotto’s career had turned toward the work of illustration. Rapid technological changes in the production of line art, which had been perfected by the photo process, eliminated the labor-intensive, time-consuming preparatory work done by woodcutters. These advances made the production of line art faster, less costly, and above all, yielded an exact replication of the artist’s drawing. The illustrations were enhanced by improvements in the quality of paper, glazing, and inks, all of which revolutionized commercial art, making the field increasingly lucrative. High-speed rotary presses made production almost instantaneous, and color printing that replaced black and white with red, yellow, blue and black ink meant that publishers could afford to include a few color reproductions in a monthly magazine issue, or on the front piece of a book, with extraordinarily good results. The American magazine was becoming big business.66 Riding the wave of the “Golden Age of Illustration,” publishers were offering “large block of their stock” as incentive to attract the best artists and writers. As far as writers were concerned, these “cheap magazines and monthlies” destroyed the short story in book form because magazines were more affordable than hardcover publications. In his essay, “The Responsibilities of the Novelist,” Frank Norris wrote that the publication of stories in monthly installments enabled a writer to “keep the pot boiling and the wolf away.” Norris was referring to a common practice of magazine publishers–ending a story at a critical part that whetted the reader’s curiosity sufficiently to purchase the next installment. Of course, as Norris pointed out, this kind of writing helped the writer to pay his bills.67 When Peixotto was hired as a staff illustrator by Scribner’s and Harper’s magazines in the early 1890s, it was the dawn of the “Golden Age of Illustration.” The burgeoning Eastern publishing houses of Scribner’s, McClures, and Harpers offered competitive salaries and the stimulating atmosphere of the East Coast. This gave writers and publishers the opportunity to work alongside talented illustrators such as Joseph Pennell, Edwin

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Revolution, he was given one full year to complete the illustrations. This allowed him the time to visit every battlefield Lodge discussed.71 Years later, in 1917, Peixotto presented his book about the American Revolutionary War, A Revolutionary Pilgrimage. In the preface, he stated that he had “systematically visited the scenes and battle-fields connected with the Revolution.” He described his journey as a “pilgrimage—a series of journeys that covered a period of almost fourteen months to rekindle the memorable landmarks that gave importance to the American Revolutionary War.” He interviewed many local people who shared with him their own “special researches into the history of their own regions.” This travel book also reflected his own American roots. His mother, Mrytilla J. Davis, was of Anglo-Virginia ancestry.72 In 1896 William Doxey, publisher of The Lark, commissioned Peixotto to illustrate Tales of Languedoc. The book was written by Stanford University professor Samuel Jacques Brun, and it was Peixotto’s first book commission. He contributed 33 pen-and-ink drawings illustrating the familial fireside stories that Brun recalled from his childhood. Each drawing was designed to enliven the remembered tale, bringing to life a dramatic moment. Through the use of a variety of lines and shadowing, Peixotto captured the imagination of the reader. Yet he drew fluidly, with the “least possible number of lines,” which allowed the subject to “glitter” as his pen moved across the page effortlessly and with animation. In 1898 Peixotto illustrated Ten Days in Chinatown, a collection of line drawings depicting scenes from San Francisco’s Chinatown. Robert Howe Fletcher annotated the drawings. This was the threshold of the muckraking era, a time in American history when the congestion rampant in large cities was being denounced and the exploitation of immigrant workers and child labor were exposed. Peixotto’s work helped to bring the plights of San Francisco’s Chinese immigrants into public consciousness. Through Ten Days In Chinatown, Peixotto and Fletcher intended to “tell the truth” about life in San Francisco’s crowded and impoverished Chinatown through the fictitious character, Wong Sue, a humble but perceptive teashop

Scribner's Magazine was an American periodical published by the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons. Scribner's Magazine was launched in 1887, and was the first of any magazine to introduce color illustrations. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

trations accompanied his article, “Through Bret Harte’s County,” commenting that Bret Harte’s unfamiliarity with the locales meant that his characters would “ride a hundred miles or more a day between two places whose names caught his fancy.”70 Peixotto was commissioned by Charles Scribner’s Sons to illustrate Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt’s book Oliver Cromwell. For this assignment Peixotto was sent to England, where he sketched and drew on location to capture the ambience of the towns, villages, and people. When commissioned by Scribner to illustrate Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s book The Story of the

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owner. Through his illustrations, Peixotto engaged the readers to “listen silently” as Wong Sue guided them through Chinatown in the hopes that the truth would be “simply immense.” Peixotto’s work was so realistic that when the journalist Wallace Irwin saw the illustrations he remarked that they “thoroughly [lifted him] back into the…sights & earthly smells of Jackson Street.”73 Peixotto was pleased with the work he had done in Chinatown. He wrote to Fletcher on November 16, 1898, saying, “At last the Chinese drawings have ceased their wanderings and come forth into the light of day. I do hope that you will be pleased with them….I, myself, designed the book and personally superintended the press work.” This was a reference to the fact that Peixotto had personally overseen the production of the photoengraved plates. Photoengraving was a new, Fish Alley, San Francisco Chinatown. innovative method of A photoengraving after the original drawing by Ernest C. Peixotto, reproducing illustrations. published in his Ten Drawings in Chinatown (1898). Up until this time, woodcutters laboriously engraved an artist’s pen-and-ink drawings onto a woodblock. the appearance of a drawing, and that he had Photoengraving was not only faster and cheaper “examined each block and if it did not bring out than the previous method—it also captured the every line [it would be] rejected and a new one subtle effects of wash drawings and watercolor. [would be] made…” He concluded by saying that Peixotto was a transitional figure in the transition the collection was “being advertised extensively” from wood-engraved illustrations to photoengrav74 and that the Bohemian Club was “to have [an] ing. Peixotto told Fletcher that the illustrations exhibit in December.” were not reduced in size, a practice that sharpens

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ARCHITECTURE

elected an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects and won high praise from New York architects. They praised his replication of architectural drawings in the style of Daniel Vierge-Martin Rico, which appeared in Harper’s Monthly and Century magazines.77 As a student in Paris, Peixotto kept abreast of San Francisco’s changing architectural styles through his correspondence with family and friends, who wrote to him of “great stories of the giant buildings they are putting up.” He feared the mismatch of San Francisco’s architecture, which drifted from style to style without definition or attention to the environment. He commented that the “architectural features of the City are a continual eyesore.” In the 1870s San Francisco’s architecture had tended toward an elaborate version of the Italianate design, accentuated by bay windows. In 1880s the High Victorian period took hold, characterized by the Queen Anne, Eastlake, and Richardsonian romanesque styles that refashioned the city’s skyline. By the time Peixotto returned to Paris to resume his studies, American architects who had been trained in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts tradition were reviving the graceful lines of a more classical style that had emerged in San Francisco. Peixotto bemoaned that San Francisco, with its vista of the bay from the rolling hills, was an “uncomparable beautiful site” that had been ignored when the city’s streets were laid out. It would have been a more “…interesting city if the streets had followed the contours of the hills, and would [wind] corkscrew–like to the summits, instead of having been chopped in mathematically straight lines to their tops,” he wrote. The building of private residences were “strangely subject” to the “fads” of builders who promoted a proliferation of bay windows. He observed that although bay windows afforded a great view and let sunlight enter the room, they were “otherwise architecturally meaningless.” Regrettably, he said that the bay windows gave way to “architectural monstrosities” of the Queen Anne and Eastlake styles, condemning both as “nightmares of the architect’s brain.” San Francisco homes were being “fixed up without rhyme or reason–restless, gabled, loaded with fantastic windows and hideous chimneys,” he claimed,

Peixotto’s precision as an illustrator gained him recognition among architects eager to present to their clients detailed drawings of their proposed plans or their finished works. He rendered one such drawing for architect and fellow Bohemian Willis Polk. Peixotto drew a sketch of Polk’s newest Market Street flatiron building, the Crocker Bank Building, in 1903. The illustration was drawn creatively and with precision. Viewed from the street level, Peixotto captured the decorative aspects of the building from the ground floor to the rooftop’s rounded observatory, drawing the viewer’s eye to the grated balconies.75 Surrounding the building, the hum of the street’s commercial activity was conveyed through details such as storefront awnings, moving horse carts, flags ruffled by a breeze, and unevenly aligned power lines. With a practiced hand and an observant eye, Peixotto took in the fine points of buildings. He noted the cornice caps of buttresses, the capitals of columns, the symmetry of a front porch, or the finished detail of a thatched or gabled roof. He took great care in his work, saying that this kind of art was viewed close to the eye and demanded exactness. 76 His training at the Académie Julian, his friendships with others who attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, including the future architect Julia Morgan, who had traveled to Paris with Peixotto’s sister Jessica to attend the Ecole, and his extensive travels throughout western Europe and the East Coast enriched Peixotto’s knowledge of architecture. Writing in pencil, Peixotto kept exact notes on narrow-lined memo pads he carried in his pocket describing what he sketched. These notes became the basis of future lectures he was invited to present to groups of architects. The lectures were accompanied by slides lit by small lanterns. His precision was well suited to architectural renderings and greatly increased his practice among architects, who sought his services to embellish their own drawings. Collectively, architects were impressed by his attention to details and how his renderings, through “tricks of light,” captured the “luminous surroundings” as he showcased the buildings. At the height of his career, Peixotto was

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and “the horror of it is that these are the so called ‘artistic’ homes of San Francisco.” The lack of architectural style was bad enough, he stated, but what made it all the more intolerable was that redwood, the abundant building material of the West Coast, was being “tortured with stone, brick, shingles, and slate, jumbled helter-skelter together.” In the end, Peixotto blamed consumers for their disregard of style and wasteful extravagance. The more features a house has, the more ‘artistic’ it is considered, he commented, continuing that the public craves “display and wants something new and fashionable for it believes that there is a fashion in architecture as there is in bonnets.” 78 Indeed, the treatment of redwood was at the heart of a heated debate among San Francisco’s architects and artisans. Even before the days of conservation, Peixotto objected to the tasteless use with which this wood, growing plentifully in the forests of northern California, was treated. Redwood was malleable and easily shipped to San Francisco on lumber schooners, and some felt that redwood was used for incidental and gratuitous purposes. Skilled carpenters, who were expert with lathes, jigsaws, shapers, and other millwork machinery, mass-produced the woodwork to embellish the interior and exterior surfaces of home after home. In contrast to the simplicity of the L-shaped, wood-frame American farmhouse style, some of which had been shipped around the Horn of Good Hope to San Francisco, the new residences of San Francisco were highly decorated with peaked rooks, arched doorways, and elaborate turnings. Adding insult to abuse, these residences were darkly painted and lacked gardens to soften their austerity, which turned block after block into monotonous rows of homes.79 Interestingly, Peixotto’s family settled into one of these row homes in the new Western Addition neighborhood at 1626 Sutter Street, a fashionable address between Octavia and Laguna Streets. This was the first opportunity that the family had to acquire their own home. Since their arrival in San Francisco, they had lived in a number of neighborhoods, following in the wake of the social elite, renting but never owning a home. Staying at the posh Cosmopolitan Hotel, located at Bush and

Sansome Streets, which was considered one of the City’s “citadel[s] of gentility” in 1869, the Peixottos mingled with the city’s upper crust. From the Cosmopolitan, the family moved to Rincon Hill, a neighborhood that had once been a favorite with business leaders, bankers, prosperous merchants, and the Southern aristocrats.80 The Western Addition offered affordable homes that were aimed at the pocketbooks of the middle class and featured a large public park that had a commanding view of the city and accessibility to the commercial and financial centers via streetcar. From their home, Raphael took public transportation to his Market Street store. His family had close proximity to the Sutter Street Temple Emanu-El, where the family worshipped and Raphael presided as president of the congregation. This new residential neighborhood became home to a quasi-Jewish neighborhood noted for its kosher butcher shops, bakeries, and synagogues. As the Western Addition spread, it became filled with “square miles of narrow, two-story residence[s], each with bay windows and a profusion of “millwork” that made the district an architectural embarrassment to some observers. Peixotto felt that San Francisco’s builders seemed to deliberately “ignore” the question of material and how to use it naturally. Strenuous in his objections to any form of artificiality, Peixotto called it “cheap” when wood was make to look like “granite, and that galvanized iron was made to match stucco.” The “sham is too apparent,” he stated and then offered in stark contrast, the “exceedingly picturesque” residences in “our old New England and our Southern colonial homes.” He stated, “The greatest fault I have to find with the recent residences in this city” is “their utter lack of simplicity.” Simplicity to him meant retaining the integrity of natural building materials, proportionate features, and a color scheme that accentuated the building and blended with the environment. San Francisco was enjoying a period of economic prosperity, and with it came a new era of purity with regard to San Francisco architectural style. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, with its City Beautiful theme, had promoted interest in architecture as well as urban redevelopment. In his

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well proportioned, of good and durable and inexpensive materials. 82 He liked the Chronicle Building with its oriel windows as well as the Crocker Building with its coffered-vaulted ceiling and walls composed of a series, or arcade, of panels. He found that the color of the Mercantile Library expressed not only simplicity but was “well-suited” to the climate of San Francisco. Among the churches, Hiberna Bank postcard, exterior view after McAllister Street addition, circa 1914. he liked St. Dominic’s Courtesy of Therese Poletti. on Steiner Street but did not like St. Mary’s feature article for April 1893 issue of Overland Cathedral on Van Ness Avenue. Monthly, Peixotto had turned his attention to San Architecture, Peixotto wrote was “not the sciFrancisco’s public buildings, writing critically of ence of construction and the art of erecting a their lack of “true architectural merit.” He deplored building, but it is the art of erecting an expressive the fact that since the early 1860s, San Francisco and a beautiful building.” The main constructive architects had “entirely abandoned” the principal facts he listed were the arrangement, plan, and to features that reflected the Spanish influence in some degree the purpose for which a building was California. He believed that the Spanish influence erected, as well as the means through which the represented a style that was “so characteristic [of architect could “express [his or her] feelings” and to the state and city] and so suited to the climate.” “show some love and study” for his or her work. A Yet Peixotto heralded the construction of the beautiful building was to possess above all else new Hibernia Bank Building, designed by his “unity of purpose” with a “predominating ‘motif,’ architect friend Albert Pissis, who ushered in the great or small, emphasized and enriched by lesser long-awaited revival of a new classical style for features.” commercial and civic buildings in San Francisco.81 The City Beautiful theme helped to initiate a Peixotto regarded the Hibernia Bank as an new era of purity in San Francisco’s architecture. It “admirable” work, a solid piece of architectural reflected the graceful revival of classical lines. The beauty in which Pissis had adhered strictly to the new breed of architects would include Willis Polk, dictates of the bank’s directors that the new buildBernard Maybeck, Ernest Coxhead, Charles ing was to be “devoted strictly to banking” and Schweinfourth, Page Brown, and John Bakewell. devoid of excessive frills. Following the Hibernia These architects would refashion San Francisco’s Bank, Peixotto cited the new Mills Building, skyline and create structures to complement the designed by Burnham and Root of Chicago, as an city’s natural beauty. example of a model office building. It was simple,

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Bohemian Club, it had shed its founding reputation of “hard drinking and hard-working artists Peixotto joined the Bohemian Club on April 18, and newspapermen” and had gained stature as an 1892, along with his older brother Edgar. A San exclusive male enclave. The club’s new members Francisco assistant district attorney, Edgar had enjoyed more refined pursuits and gatherings. gained fame in 1895 as the successful prosecutor in Founded in 1872, the Bohemian Club had once the famed William Henry Theodore Durant murshared the floor space opposite the California der case. A graduate of Hastings College of the School of Design, above the noisy and smelly Pine Law, Edgar was an exceptionally brilliant scholar Street California Market. Sharing the confines of a and a persuasive orator who became actively small space and a possessing a kindred spirit in the involved in the California Republican Party as well arts meant that that the actors, artists, and writers as various civic and promotional activities that of one association often became members of the boosted San Francisco as a convention city. In other. However, money was an issue with these turn, he was a member of the executive committee founding members. It was suspected that the for the Portola Festival in 1909 and the Panama change in the club’s membership—inviting Pacific International Exposition Committee, as wealthy silver barons to join—was a means for the well as the president of the Down Town club to “pay its bills.” By the late 1880s, the club’s Association and the Chamber of Commerce. In activities included lavish dramatic productions, addition to his membership in the Bohemian staged in the secluded redwood forest along the Club, Edgar joined the Union League, the Russian River, which blended playful revelry with a Olympic Club, and became a Mason.83 quasi-religious reverence for nature.85 Both brothers were known for their serious Peixotto had become an active participant in the commitment to the organizations they joined. Yet stage productions, both as an artist and actor. In Ernest Peixotto was noted as the more versatile. the early spring of 1892, he had been asked to comHis conversation was peppered by a kind and “marpose the “pictorial invitation” in which all the velous sense of humor” reflected in his a “magnetic member players were represented as “tramps” for eyes.” 84 By the time the brothers joined the the March 5 High Jinks. This performance was followed by the customary supper and Low Jinks play, in which Peixotto took part as one of the actors. The setting was that of a Café Chantant, and to give an international accent to the production, a color scheme of yellow poppies, sunflowers, and marigolds was chosen along with a “bust of Shakespeare” that was “draped with the Star Spangled Banner and the Union Jack” flags. Peixotto was called A rare look at Bohemian Grove during the summer Hi-Jinks. upon to join fellow Courtesy of Wikipedia.

BOHEMIAN CLUB

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member Solly Walters in the creation of a special menu card for each guest, as well as presenting to their guest of honor, the celebrated English actor Sir Henry Irving, a “cartoon” of himself. The evening’s performance ranked as one of the Club’s “pleasantest affairs.”86 Over the years, Peixotto could be counted on to create the clever caricatures, individual hand puppets, and scenery needed by the members for their Jinks productions. In 1895 he created an oil cartoon for the Low Jinks play Svengali, a take-off of Du Maurier’s story “Trilby.” It was rumored that had it not been for the “remarkable acting” of the “unusually good” cast, Svengali would go down as a “travesty” of the original play. Although it was an “incredible fantasy,” it was also an immense success as fellow-Bohemians interrupted the actors with “approving bursts of laughter and applause.” 87 Peixotto portrayed “Little Billee” and his brother Edgar took the role of “Gecko.” Both were applauded for their “equally good” performances. Afterward, Frank Norris, who was sponsored for membership by Peixotto, playfully addressed personal letters to Peixotto as “Little Billee.” Through Pexiotto’s interaction with his fellow Bohemians, the personality of Peixotto as a man emerges. A committed and serious participant, he was sworn in as a Knight of Round Table and became one of the club’s most popular members. He reflected “the energetic Club spirit.” He was also regarded as a “notoriously moral man…very quiet and without any of the small vices” peculiar to some less conscientious clubmen. Louis Slosa recounted that “Uncle George Bromley has tried in vain to teach the young artist to smoke,” to no avail. George Bromley, the “Patriarch” of the club, was the president of the Bohemian Club at the time, and seemed to embody the more hedonistic tendencies of some club members. “Uncle George,” as he was affectionately known to his fellow Bohemians, usually stayed at affairs “long past sunrise” and was known to be taken “home in defiance of his earnest protest.” In contrast, Peixotto remained sober and focused on his work.88

LIFE IN NEW YORK CITY The decision to leave San Francisco was difficult. Peixotto claimed that his heart would always be in California, but he could not pass up the opportunity to go East because the East offered artists like himself, who possessed a versatile range of artistic expression, a lucrative market for their works.89 Peixotto was nearly twenty-eight years old. He was enjoying his success as an illustrator and was also acquiring a solid reputation for his oil paintings and architectural commentaries. Scribner’s magazine had already offered to him the exclusive commission to draw the article “Tall Buildings” plus a second commission to illustrate the Boston Public Library. On the heels of his departure, Peixotto was interviewed by the San Francisco Morning Call and outspokenly scolded San Franciscans for their lack of appreciation of the fine arts. He swiped at San Franciscans and Americans in general, saying that “…in this city all classes, are so lacking in knowledge of art, that all pictures… I have alluded to are absolutely laboured.” Yet, he admitted, “…there are a small coterie of people in this city, who, having no great wealth, use any surplus money they may have in adding to their precious store of art treasures. They are doing a genuinely grand work; but as for the rest my original remark holds good.” With this said, he was on the train East. Peixotto was well received by the artists of the East Coast. He lunched at their private clubs and was invited to join the elite art circles. Certainly this was a contrast to Pappa Coppa’s trattorie and the antics of “Les Jeunes.” The writer Charles Warren Stoddard, a native-born upstate New Yorker and transplanted Californian, invited Peixotto for a winter lunch on January 7, 1897. His invitation was unusual: he drew Peixotto a map to the luncheon site under which he listed the time and date.90 Another regular correspondent was Maxfield Parrish, who lived in Windson, Vermont. Parrish’s penmanship was so precise that one swore he had placed a lined tablet under his writing paper. The formation of his capital letters was manuscript per-

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fect and his salutation, “Dear Peixotto,” took up an entire line. Working in freezing weather, Parrish wrote to him, remarking, “How tantalizing your picture of California was…warm sunshine, skies of blue crystal, and birds beginning to guild. And here [on Saranac Lane] the mercury stand at 32 degrees below zero.” It was amazing to Parrish that “people live out doors all winter long” and seemed immune to the cold. Parrish told Peixotto about a visit from Robert Louis Stevenson. Parrish reported that the “locals thought [Stevenson] was a great man, but they thought his manners might be different.” Stevenson behaved rudely, often referring to the locals as "the idiots.” Parrish continued writing that Stevenson “would sit up in bed, in the bitter cold, with nothing on but his wife’s pink dressing gown with long ribbons, and try to write and swear at any one who came near the door. But what of that.” In all, Parrish told Peixotto that the “Adirondack region” was “hopeless, impossible for the artist,” yet he himself could not go back to the city to live or work.91 With Mollie at his side, Peixotto returned to Europe, where he completed a number of illustrations for Scribner’s. In Europe, Peixotto felt that he had the freedom to paint. His hope was to become a portrait painter. The couple rented an apartment in Paris as well as a studio, where he painted Lady in Yellow, one of his most notable paintings. It depicted a women’s figure with her back turned, looking into the mirror. Dressed in lemon-yellow satin of a brilliant texture and an orange corsage and slippers of the same hue, the painting was sent to the San Francisco Art Association Show for the January 1903 exhibition. It was purchased by Mrs. Phoebe Hearst. Mrs. Hearst already owned paintings by Monet, Pisano, and Degas. Lady in Yellow was reportedly exhibited in Buffalo, New York, then Chicago and Philadelphia. This painting fetched Peixotto $750.92 Peixotto and Mollie traveled to the charming little towns of the Loire Valley, where they sketched the numerous romantic chateaux and cathedrals. Peixotto was particularly taken with Chartres, where he acquired “an old blouse and skirt and all the paraphernalia used by a peasant woman.” The

skirt, although clean, was discolored and aged by wear, but Peixotto valued it as a “perfect work of art so far as patching was concerned.” To anyone who would listen, he recounted that “There’s a whole history hidden in that garment….and somehow clean honest poverty, such as one sees along the Norman coast, is rendered doubly attractive by the picturesque dress.” It was along the Normandy coast that he did most of his “outdoor work.” Continuing on their travels, Peixotto and Mollie looked for what he called the “fine bits for study” that could “be picked out of every street corner.” These were the details that he painted. Peixotto was exclusively Scribner’s “man in France.” From France he and Mollie began an extensive trip throughout Europe.93 They went to England, where Peixotto did fifty illustrations for Theodore Roosevelt’s Oliver Cromwell.94 He spent hours acquainting himself with English architecture and period costumes to make his illustrations look authentic. Leaving England, they journeyed to Italy, where Peixotto “…took many pen-and-ink and pencil sketches at the numerous delightful little villages around the Bay of Naples from the Island of Capri to Torre del Greco. At Sienna, that ancient walled city between Florence and Rome, Peixotto took advantage of the “splendid opportunities” to sketch and paint. He would later say that “One may wander almost anywhere in Italy and revel in beauty of form and of color as exemplified in the wonderful tints given by nature in the quaint old buildings, the stately palaces and the very people themselves.” Peixotto and Mollie visited Peixotto’s sister, Jessica, who was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris for the 1897 semester. Jessica had traveled to France along with another Berkeley graduate, Julia Morgan, who had recently received her baccalaureate degree in civil engineering. Morgan’s intention was to study architecture at the Ecole des BeauxArts in Paris and for a period of time they stayed at an American club for women at 4 rue de Chevreuse.95 Jessica was a bright and lively young woman, who had years earlier locked horns with her father over her desire to enroll at the University of

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Committee drop his name from the list. He wrote: “I have not been a practising [sic] Jew since my boyhood and therefore do not believe that my name should be included in your records.”96 Jessica was buried from her Unitarian Church, while Peixotto’s memorial service would be held at St. James Episcopal Church in downtown Manhattan. Raphael offered his daughter the “best private tutors” to instruct her in foreign languages, music, and writing. However, he firmly held to his opinion that “University life was not appropriate for a young girl to whom were available the rich opportunities within a cultured home circle.” Then Jessica learned that one could enter the university as a “special student.” She enrolled in conventional cultural courses, taking history and foreign languages before meeting Frank Norris, who upbraided her for “frittering away her time.” Norris admonished, “Either attend the University as a regular student, or stay away altogether.”97 Norris had recently returned to the university to complete his undergraduate degree when he met Jessica in a drama program. He befriended Jessica, encouraging her to pursue her studies seriously. Norris became a regular dinner guest at the Peixotto table. There, Norris shared his writing of a book about Polk Street. Although the family wondered how anyone could find material for story about “a minor business street,” the book catapulted Norris into fame. The book was McTeague.98 Jessica took Norris’s advice, and within three years she completed a four-year program, graduating in 1894. The following year she returned to the Berkeley campus to do graduate work in the Political Science Department under Professor Bernard Moses, who turned her attention to the field of economics. During the academic year 1895–1896, Jessica was enrolled as a candidate for her doctorate and would spend the following year at the Sorbonne. She would be only the second woman to graduate from the University of California. She became a leading advocate of charity work in the Bay Area and continued to lecture as an assistant professor on the Berkeley campus. She ended her academic careers as Professor Emeritus, and was honored for her social work throughout California.99

The Torre del Mangia, Palazzo Publica in Siena, Italy, by Ernest C. Peixotto. Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto.

California at Berkeley. Graduating Girls’ High School in 1880, Jessica spent eleven years trying to convince her father to allow her to attend the university. Raphael was not opposed to learning. He was a well-read man, described by his mentor, the scholarly Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger, as a “merchant by day and a student by night.” Aesthetic in appearance, Raphael taught Sunday school classes to the children of Temple Emanu-El, but his religious devotion was not embraced by his children. Edgar became a Mason, and Peixotto no longer practiced his Judaism. When the American Jewish Committee undertook the project of documenting all those of the Jewish faith who served in the United States Armed Forces during World War I, Peixotto wrote to Julian Leavitt asking that the 65

NORRIS The Golden Age of Illustration ended two years shy of the dawn of the Twentieth Century. The United States was about to become a world power with its victory over Spain in the Spanish American War. Peixotto and Mollie had left for France before the hostilities erupted in April of 1898. Sadly, his first cousin, Captain Daniel L. M. Peixotto, who was the provost marshal of the city of Guantanamo, Cuba and Frank Norris, who was sent to cover the war by eastern magazines, were both affected by yellow fever. But it was Peixotto’s cousin, Daniel, who died of the dreaded fever while Norris survived.100 Norris was among the first news correspondents to return from Cuba and in his letters to Peixotto, he told of the horrors of what he had seen and his coming down with yellow fever. Writing on August 11, 1898, Norris told of the Santiago campaign, “I had your very kind little note… and would have replied sooner were it not that I’ve been down with fever ever since leaving Santiago. The thing got me somewhere between Daiquiri and San Juan…Now that I can…get a perspective of the last three months, the whole business seems nothing but a hideous blur of mud and blood.” At the time, Peixotto was working at Chadd’s Ford, where he was doing the illustrations for Henry Cabot Lodge’s book, The Story of the Revolution. Shaken by the experience, Norris continued, “There is precious little glory in war, if the Santiago campaign is a sample, and when you try to recall the campaign, it’s only the horrors that come to you, the horrors and the hardships and nothing of the finer side. I’ve made a roof for myself to sleep under, out of boards that were one glaze of dried blood, though I didn’t find it out till morning. I have seen men who were shot in the throat stretched out under the sun… who had been for forty-eight hours without water, food, sleep, shelter or medical attendance. I have seen a woman of seventy trying to carry on her back another of ninety-two and at Caney I was the first to discover, in one of the abandoned houses, the body of a little girl—Ernest, I don’t believe she was fifteen—who had been raped and then knifed to

Frank Norris c. 1902. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library Portrait Collection, Berkeley, Ca

death just before the beginning of the battle. I want to get these things out of my mind and the fever out of my blood and so if my luck holds I am going back to the old place for three weeks and for the biggest part of the time I hope to wallow and grovel in the longest grass I can find in the Presidio Reservation on the cliffs overlooking the Ocean and absorb and smell smells that don’t come from rotting and scorched vegetation dead horses and bad water.”101 Norris had returned to San Francisco, in the hope that being in California would heal him physically from the effects of the fever as well as emotionally reckoning with tragedy of the war. He also wanted to spend time with his beloved Jeannette.102 From the Hotel Pleasanton in San Francisco Norris wrote to his dear friend, “My dear oleman and Mrs. Billy Magee, it’s a wonder that I don’t forget my own name these days, I’m having such a bully good time. Feel just as if I was out of doors playing after being in school for years. Jeanette and I spent the whole afternoon on the waterfront

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yesterday…and came back and had tea and pickled ginger and red pepper—I’m full of ginger and red pepper and getting ready to stand up on my hind legs and yell big.” Norris continued, saying that McTeague was soon to be published in London and that his work on Wheat was going well. Norris thanked them for helping to “make this hard winter of ‘98–99 easy for me….there were times when the whole thing was something of a grind, and it didn’t seem worth while to go on at all. Well, somehow one does pull through with such help as yours. …I owe you both more than I can ever express.” Norris recovered from yellow fever and went on to complete his trilogy as well as other books. He died unexpectedly in 1902, due to an infection following an appendectomy. In 1933, Peixotto was asked by the Saturday Review of Literature to write a remembrance of

Norris and their association. The article was entitled “Romanticist Under the Skin.” 103 In it, Peixotto reproduced the letter of 1892. He gave a nostalgic tribute to Norris, but cautioned his readers that “a number of personal matters included by Norris have been deleted from the letter as printed,” ensuring privacy, with an advisory to the readers that “no where do the omissions exist.”

AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR

Each New Year, Mollie gave to her husband a pocket-size diary, inscribing the first page with good wishes for “happiness and success” throughout the year. 104 Peixotto used it to jot his appointments and tally bills, writing his notations in a small scrawl that he penciled across the page. The next two decades would be filled with success, including the publication of his travel books, numerous requests by authors and publishers to illustrate their works, and an extensive itinerary that took him and Mollie across the continental United States between their New York studios to San Francisco and then onto Europe and South America. They would also spend time in their home in Fontainebleau, France. Sadly, both suffered the loss of beloved family members. Mollie’s brother Prentiss was lost while fishing in the Sierras, and Peixotto’s father, Raphael, the venerable president of Temple Emanu-El, died at the age of 67.105 Requests from the leading magazines, as well as personal requests Mary and Ernest Peixotto relax at their home in Fontainbleau. Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto. for Peixotto’s illustra-

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tions, continued. In 1903 he provided illustrations for Edith Wharton’s article in the American Magazine, and would later illustrate her books, Valley of Decision and A Motor Flight Through France, as well as Frederick Milton Willis’ The City of Is and Other Poems. His oil paintings, composed in the style of the “old world” masters, were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Museum of Art, and the Toledo Museum of Art. His oil painting The Dutch Bird Cage was shown at the National Academy of Design in New York. Upon completing the illustrations for Senator Henry Lodge’s The Story of the Revolution, Peixotto was commissioned to illustrate Charles Hemstreet’s book Nooks and Corners of Old New York.106 From his fellow Bohemians, Peixotto was asked to do the illustrations for their programs. In 1904, he did the front piece for Sunset magazine picturing a grove of redwood trees within the Bohemian Club’s Russian River encampment, as well as the illustration In Bohemia’s Grove of Redwoods, which highlighted their summer festivities. Following his clever pen-and-ink wash drawing for the Bohemian Club entitled the "The Procession of the Owl" in 1892, he offered an untitled piece of the majestic Grove redwoods in 1903 that was highlighted four years later with an oil painting entitled The Triumph of Bohemia.107 His oil painting La Dame au Serin, which he submitted to the Paris Salon in 1904, was exhibited along with paintings by Gorges J. Lefebvre. It was probably sold in Paris, as it was never exhibited in New York or San Francisco. For the Paris Salon of 1905, Peixotto again choose Mollie as his model and found another yellow satin gown to recapture the feelings evoked in Lady In Yellow. This time he created The Dutch Bird Cage, which portrays a lady in a yellow dress sitting on a chair as she is looking at a birdcage set on a low table. Peixotto again skillfully modulated the play of light and shade against the quaint interior. After its presentation in Paris, the painting came to the United States and was exhibited at the National Academy and the Corcoran and Albright Galleries. Then it was purchased by Miss Grace Manchester. The others were Italian garden paintings: Reverie and Un Jardin Abandonne. The

jury committee accepted all three paintings, and it was considered an honor to have three paintings recognized at the same time.108 As magazines sought Peixotto’s illustrations, so did clubs who offered him membership as compensation. Edward Penfreed, representing the Greenwich Village Salmagundi Club wrote, “Please be sure to send in four of your drawings for the Illustrators Exhibition….This is the first exhibition of illustrations the club has held, and we must all do everything we can to make it a go.” Will Irwin asked him to join the Dutch Lunch Club. Other clubs included the Players Club and the Lotus Club. When he addressed The Pen and Brush Club as its “guest of honor,” he demonstrated his high organizational skills, delivering his presentations that were written on three-by-two-and-a-half narrow lined paper fitted into a small binder. Art schools sought him as an instructor, and from 1907 to 1908, he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1908 he became an associate of the National Academy. In that same year he wrote two articles for Scribner’s, “Notable Paintings in the Seattle Expositions” and “The King’s Highway in California.” A note from Theodore Dreiser, who was the managing editor of The Broadway Magazine, asked for an illustration featuring the outline of New York’s waterfront as well as a front piece view from Battery Park East River.109 Scribner’s sent him to Europe on a roving commission, and over four summers he continued to travel to England, Scotland, France, Tunis, and Italy, collecting materials for the publisher as well as for himself that would appear in his travel books. In his quiet and unassuming manner, he charmed the locals as he painted and drew them and their quaint villages. During the winter months, he and Mollie retreated to their home in Fontainebleau. It was at Fontainebleau that he and other expatriate artists perfected their version of en plein air style.110 Frederick Mortimer Clapp, who would organize the famous Frick Collection,111 appreciated working with Peixotto because he had “a clear hold of things.” Peixotto’s ability to convey visual imagery through his illustrations was seen as being “steadily

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Through the French Provinces followed in 1909. In the preface Peixotto wrote, “Years ago, when I went as a mere boy to study in France, the country and its picturesque towns and villages took a strong hold upon me….the French provinces seem ever to unfold new riches….With the possible exception of Italy, I know of no country whose little towns so well repay investigation.” Quickly upon the heels of this book was the highly acclaimed Romantic California, published in October 1910. Peixotto’s books sold well and Scribner’s took great care in their publication as noted by Joseph Hawley Chapin, the head of Scribner’s Art Department, who wrote him that, “The California book is coming out in October and we will try to keep the printer up [on] the job.”112 Americans were traveling and responded well to Peixotto’s style. Peixotto dedicated Romantic California to his mother, Mrytilla, describing the State’s moderate climate, its fertile farmlands, and its romantic historical charm reminiscent of the “Old World” that made the “State a Mecca” for artists.113 Peixotto was often quoted comparing his native state to Italy, telling his readers that “If you want to behold a bit of the Bay of Naples, go some misty morning to Gothic Cathedral in England by Ernest C. Peixotto. [San Francisco’s] Fisherman’s Wharf.” Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto. The original drawings were shown at Vickerey’s where they attracted an and surely achieved.” This “won him a leading appreciative audience. A noted book reviewer place among American illustrators,” while his oil approached Peixotto during the exhibit, commentpaintings attracted “the attention of connoisseurs ing that Peixotto was indeed first an artist and and professional artists” as well. then a writer. “My dear fellow”, responded the Peixotto continued to amass sufficient art to quick-witted Peixotto, “I’m very glad to have you illustrate and write his travel books, beginning say it that way. I’d hate to have it said that I paint with the October 1906 publication By Italian Seas, like a writer and write like a painter.” Between a journey that took the reader down the working on these travel books, Peixotto continued Dalmatian Coast through Italy and Sicily, ending to paint in what was described as a “staccoto style.” in Tunis. Pitching his tent in nearby Cypress Grove in

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Monterey, California, he painted the elegant Monterey pines along the coast, and in 1915, he sent his painting entitled The Pool, La Granja. It was “well received” by the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition for exhibit.114 Peixotto and Mollie then turned their compass toward South America, where they traveled down the coast to Lima, Peru. Somewhere in Peru he contracted an illness that caused them to return to San Francisco. Although his illness was undisclosed, it still made the front page of the San Francisco Call. The full-face photograph of Peixotto showed dark rings around his eyes, and it was reported that Scribner’s publishing house hoped that he would not press himself to complete his commissioned work. Once recovered, Peixotto and Mollie sailed to Italy, where he sketched scenes which were used in a large mural exhibited at the New York Architectural League and were purchased by a well-known New York architect, Charles Platt.115 In 1913 he published Pacific Shores From Panama. A critic wrote that readers were fortunate to have a “chatty person to have for a guide.” Peixotto’s style was described as a Patio of the Torre Tagle Palace, Lima, Peru, by Ernest C. Peixotto. series of casual, entertaining, and Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto. informative letters written between intimate friends. Readers viewed him Native Americans with their art center near Santa as a fellow “tourist, pure and unalloyed,” describing Fe and then went on to explore “the old Spanish backgrounds with alluring pictures of long days on settlements still scattered through Arizona and the tropical seas of quaint Spanish cities. In his New Mexico and along the Texan border–pic1916 book Our Hispanic Southwest, Peixotto wrote turesque material that has been sadly neglected by that he had “traversed” this corner of the our writers and artists.” American southwest “many times.” He began the Wanting “to point out these Spanish remains in book in New Orleans, taking his audience to the our own Southwest, and hint at the thrilling stories El Paso and then onto Albuquerque, Taos, and of their foundation, is the reason for this book,” he Santa Fe. He devoted a chapter to the “The Taos wrote. Society of Artists,” describing the life style of the

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WORLD WAR I By the time that the United States entered World War I, Peixotto was forty-eight years old, far too old to be drafted. Older than the average enlistee, Peixotto was well settled into a comfortable lifestyle. He enjoyed membership in a number of elite clubs, from San Francisco’s exclusive Bohemian Club to New York’s Salmagundi Club, Century Club, the Société des Artistes Français, and Les Anciens, the loosely associated alumni of Académie Julian who were living in New York City. Peixotto had been elected to the Society of Illustrators and he and Mollie were regular attendees of the MacDowell’s Club Christmas Gala at the Plaza Hotel. He was a highly respected professional who could have avoided the commitment of being drafted, but instead he chose to serve his country. He elected to tell, through his illustrations, the story of the country that nurtured his artistic abilities: his cherished France. Ernest Peixotto was one of eight prominent American illustrators approached by George Creel’s agents to assess their interest in being drafted into the American Expeditionary Forces. It was Charles Dana Gibson, an accomplished illustrator and the chairman of the Committee on Public Information CPI Division of Pictorial Publicity, who tapped Peixotto on behalf of the Creel Committee.116 Throughout the war effort, Gibson urged his fellow artists to depict, through their various mediums, the human cost of war. Creel was the head of the United States Committee on Public Information, which would set the standard for the spin of wartime propaganda that future administrations would follow. Under the direction of President Woodrow Wilson, Creel’s mission was to reach “deep into every American community” to jar Americans out of their complacency to “the full message of America’s idealism, unselfishness, and indomitable purpose,” instilling into the consciousness of ordinary Americans that the United States was evolving into a major world power. Concurrent with this message, the Wilson administration sought “to break through the barrage of lies that kept the people of the Central Powers in darkness and delusion.” Through a

Portrait photograph taken of Ernest Peixotto. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Arnold Genthe Collection.

massive program of education and information, Creel’s objective was to make Germany pay for the destruction of Europe, in part through the mobilization of American artists.117 Creel ambitiously used every “medium of appeal” that art could offer, from newspapers to professional orators to the creation of posters depicting horrific trench warfare scenes. Speaking groups such as the Blue Devils and Pershing’s Veterans were organized. The “Four Minute Men,” a body of 75,000 speakers speaking in 5,200 communities who made a total of 755,190 speeches across the country, attained fame by convincing Americans of the idealist righteousness of the war. Writers and leading novelists of the day were enlisted in support of this democratic endeavor, along with essayists, publicists, and even the small rural presses and other wire services. America’s budding motion

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picture industry cranked out feature films like Pershing’s Crusaders, America’s Answer, and Under Four Flags. Still photos and stereopticon slides were used to tell the horrors of this great conflict, and a total of 1,438 drawings by artists and illustrators appeared on posters and sign boards that were hung on shop walls or in store windows. Creel and his agents entrusted the distribution of this material to the Boy Scouts, with their youthful innocent faces. It was important that the artists and illustrators who participated in this effort be seen as draftees who volunteered themselves for the cause of democracy. They were to [produce a] “complete pictorial record of the war” which was to include “maps, technical fortifications, and trench systems” suitable for viewing by the “public in magazines and newspapers.” In Creel’s words, these artists would “occupy a front seat at the greatest drama the word has ever known,” with works that portrayed the brutality of war for which “a camera is inadequate.”118 The functions of the official artists and the official photographers, in the thinking of Creel’s Committee, were “immeasurably distinct and that only in a very small measure do they overlap.” The technology and the speed at which film captured action were still in their formative stages as America marched to the drumbeat of this war. It would not be until the 1940s that film had sufficiently advanced to capture the fast action of battle scenes, turning those images into photographs and newsreels. Following in the tradition of illustrators from the Civil War to the Spanish American War, who were sent to the battlefront with colored pencils, brushes, and sketch pads, the American Expeditionary Forces artists were ordered to quickly draw the images, and in some cases, embellish them before they were published. The “Creel” artists, as this small contingency referred to themselves, were to “depict sacrifices” and to “whip the emotions” of a peaceful people into a frenzy of patriotic spirit. 119 Overall, the more gory the images, the better to whet the public appetite for explicit visuals of the unfolding tragedy. When the United States entered the war in the spring of 1917, Peixotto was in France. He quickly

returned stateside on May 1 to his post at Scribner’s. He reported that the “French Government…[had] directed its efforts toward employing [the artists of France] in work for which they were especially fitted…. [sending them]… to the front with special permits…to make sketches from the scenes in the trenches, in the avant postes, in the hospitals, on the battlefields, and in ruined villages [and to do] …topographical drawings [while] those who remained behind the lines worked for the great propaganda” machinery. Peixotto’s fluency in the French language and his extensive knowledge of France’s geography added to his attractiveness to the Creel committee. Additionally, he understood the importance of camouflage, which French artists had used from the beginning of the war to deceive the Germans. Expert in this knowledge, Peixotto urged the formation of an American Camouflage Corps, which by August became the mission to the Army Corps of Engineers.120 Early in 1918, Peixotto’s consent to his enlistment was approved and his physical was “expedited.” He was described as 5’5” weighing 130 pounds with grey eyes and dark brown hair. His nose was straight, mouth large, chin and face square, complexion fair. Most notable was that the fourth finger of each hand was “crooked.” And he was ambidextrous. Born left-handed, Peixotto had adapted to painting with his right hand, since the palattes at his time were designed for the left hand. Instead of having a palette made to fit his right hand, he learned to paint with his right hand but continued to write, draw, and sign all of his paintings with his left hand.121 On February 26, 1918, a Western Union Telegram arrived at Peixotto’s New York apartment telling him to report, “without delay to Hoboken, New Jersey and prepare for expended field service.”122 He was “appointed” to the rank of captain in the Engineer Reserve Corps, and it was clearly understood that he was “not a graduate in engineering” and would not be involved in any tasks involving the building or destroying fortifications. On March 5, 1918, Peixotto was assigned to active duty and within ten days was ordered to proceed to France on the troopship Pochontas. Before

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Portrait photograph of Ernest Peixotto and his wife, Mary (Mollie) ca. Feb. 28, 1918. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Arnold Genthe Collection.

leaving, however, he and Mollie posed for the photographer Arnold Genthe and moved to a new nine-story apartment building at 137 East SixtySixth Street. Occupying a top floor apartment, they had a master bedroom, a cozy den with a balcony that faced south, a dining room in which Peixotto painted murals, a kitchen, and a small back bedroom. There was also a sunroom, in which Mollie wrote letters to Peixotto from the time of his debarkation to her arrival in France. It was these letters that told of the passionate love affair which neither had taken for granted over the course of their twenty-one-year marriage.123

On the day Peixotto sailed for France, Mollie addressed him as “Dear One,” writing: “It is the most wonderful thing to write you as a Captain in our Army overseas. It is to me, as your wife, a proud moment. You have in yourself today the army, the pen and the brush; a writer, a painter and an officer, all three dedicated to your country.” She continued, “My beloved, they have chosen well, to choose you.” Knowing that he was happy in this work, Mollie bore his decision gracefully, expressing her feelings over their separation in lengthy letters. “The nights are wonderful—and we have the moon—You have

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it now and that is a consolation. I speak always into the night to you. Such wonderful light takes my message—which is my heart’s throb and my mind tranquil—Main dan la main, Coeur caitre Coeur.” In another letter she told him, “I have began to read the Psalms of David at night before I sleep—from your old French Testament. They are really beautiful songs.” She patiently waited for confirmation that he had arrived safely in France, reminding him that “to be on French soil again is very great.” On Easter Sunday, March 31 of 1918, she replied, “Your cable reached me yesterday at one, and gladden me until checks burned with joy.” Mollie sailed for France on May 20, 1918. Childless, Mollie had every reason to follow her husband. The ties that bound them were their art, as well as their great love for what Mollie described as “our beautiful France.” In one of her letters, Mollie reminded her husband not to tell his commanding officers that she would be joining him, as “It might make them unhappy” and, of course, she did not want to disturb his work. Reunited in their beloved France, one can imagine their celebration when they met. But Mollie was faithful to her promise of not disturbing his work. Having volunteered at a New York clinic, she offered her services as a nurse’s aide in the 24-bed American Hospital. Casualties were transported by other volunteers in a fleet of small flatbed vehicles known as American Ambulances. New York businessmen, among them Percy Peixotto, whose father was Benjamin Peixotto, the diplomat and the brother of Peixotto’s father, Raphael, were at the forefront of this humanitarian endeavor. Mollie herself felt quite “capable about hospital work,” having “clinical experience” as well as being on “the executive board of the Art War Relief and… on the Committee of Vocational Rehabilitation.” Peixotto and his fellow artist-officers received a carefully scripted set of orders for the work they were about to undertake. They were instructed to use “wash, pencil, crayon” that were “suitable to magazine and newspaper publication. 124 Pencil work was reserved for scenic or structural drawings; crayons for portraits of prominent men; and oil paint would be used for those replications of “per-

manent historic value” that were not intended for distribution to the press. These official artists were to remember that their sketches and paintings were for both historical purposes and for “current use in American publications to which these sketches will be distributed through the War Department.” According to the Office of the Provost Marshall, the artists had official permission to “travel anywhere within [a designated] area” and were permitted “to pass all guard lines and enter buildings, for the purpose of making such sketches and painting of reservation as he may desire.” On the first of each month, Lieutenant Colonel W. C. Sweeney ordered that the artists were to decide which sketches were of “good advantage” and thus “forwarded to [his] office for immediate release through Washington.” Photostatic copies would be handled by the Signal Corps, with one positive retained by the artist who did the sketch. Another positive, and if possible the negative, would be retained in the office of the Department Chief for the record, and the original would be forwarded to Washington. All would “bear the title on the back showing the name of the artist, the date, the place and a brief description on the subject.” Each artist would prepare a brief summary of his work of the preceding thirty days, any work pending, and the work completed for the succeeding thirty days. These would constitute an accounting of the unit’s work. Officially, Peixotto and his fellow AEF artists were stationed in the area of Neufchateau, where he occupied a billet at the Rue Jules Ferry on a monthly basis. Given this military lodging, Mollie did not accompany him. However, it was also clear that he had come to France financially independent of his Army pay. He maintained his personal checking account with the Crédit Lyonnais and eventually chose a “studio home” that became a summer resident at Samois-sur-Seine, close to Fontainebleu and he and Mollie’s villa, Seine et Marne. This studio home served “as headquarters for the official artists.”125 In contrast to Peixotto’s almost privileged lifestyle as an Army officer, his younger brother Eustace, who had recently graduated with honors from the University of California at Berkeley,

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A typical village of the Lorraine front in which American troops were billeted, sketched by Captain Ernest C. Peixotto. Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto.

enlisted with the first wave of American volunteers. Eustace, a newly commissioned lieutenant with the Forty-Fifth Infantry,126 was engaged in the action that his older brother drew. Peixotto began his tour of duty in May, and by his report, it was an extremely busy month for him. He traveled to the Second Division near Verdun, where some of the fiercest battles had taken place with one and one-half million casualties. By the middle of the month, he had visited the TwentySixth Division, which saw action in the northeast of France. Starting at Boucq, he sent a memo to his chief saying that he planned to return to Samois-sur-Seine and then onto Neufchateau to see if that “locality would be better suited for their

work.” Up to this point, he had sketched ten pieces. From Neufchateau area, he spent a week at Baccarat drawing the area and the Army’s river crossing before going onto the Bazoilles hospital and Langres. He concluded his report saying that he had been with the Thirty-Second Division in Alsace and was interested in an “extended trip along the lines of the S.O.S.”127 As the month ended, Peixotto encountered an unpleasant experience at Soppe-le-Bas. The lieutenant-colonel of the regiment “strongly criticized the policy of having captains attached to the AEF as official artists. Although Peixotto tried to convince his superior of the usefulness of this work, he was rebuffed when the colonel retorted, “This was

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no way to win the war.” 128 If the colonel saw through the ruse of propaganda, Major General Haan “regretted this unpleasant incident” and admonished the colonel for upbraiding the artists, concluding with the hopeful statement that some “good and interesting sketches” might be forthcoming. In the eyes of the Army officials, the only “good and interesting” sketches were those that portrayed the complete devastation of enemy fortifications by the AEF. The artists were instructed to convey the contrived imagery of what the War Department wanted to publish. They were told to depict scenes with tanks in formation that moved through the mist of the dawn so “they would look like monsters of the ancient world.” Or better yet, the tanks could be shown coming down a dusty road at sunset with their headlights penetrating the dust clouds and the soldiers seated atop it cheering as they passed an enemy outpost they had recently destroyed. When drawing battle scenes involving airplanes, the artists were told to draw firefighters, selecting their most vivid colors to highlight the flames that belched from their gun ports. It was suggested that the artists could either draw the airplanes fighting through the clouds or in a night battle under the moon as great spears of headlights crossed each other and shells like rockets fell from the air. Other suggestions for drawings included the depiction of rows upon rows of hard, sturdylooking American soldiers wearing their trench helmets and carrying their packs, or German prisoners coming down a road herded by an American soldier who was young enough to “still have the air” in his lungs that he had breathed last year herding cattle in Kansas. As the artists began to submit their work, earnest representations of the realities they observed, there was a growing sense among Creel’s committee that the drawings were disappointing. Controversy raged about the efficacy of contriving fantasized pulp-book battles and their impact on the reading public. The military, professional journalists, and artists all objected. The loudest Army critic was Major Robert Johnston, who roared that it was “foolish, and it utterly fails to get at the grim reality under which the American

Army is struggling in Europe. If the C.P.C. wants [this] sort of thing done, why select men of artistic standards and conscience and send them abroad when they can get inspirational pictures turned out by the bushel at home at for less expense?” It was obvious to him that demanding a contrived, politically motivated rendering of the war was “a detriment to inspirational artists” who were serious about their work, and commented that sending them to a war zone also meant the “continuous risk of [the artist’s] life.” The New York Times rebutted, editorializing that the contributing artists took their responsibility with a “frank determination to do their best for their country” with a “high order” of talent and in a “quiet, unobtrusive manner,” in the absence of sentimentalism. The art community joined the debate. In the New York Tribune, speaking for the Allied War Salon, Royal Cortissoz said, “Its most characteristic, most interesting qualities are those of documentary record….If the war has produced anything for us it has produce these snapshots in water color and pencil….” As for Peixotto, he had become more of a student of topography than of military action, a knowledge that would serve him well in his later work as an author and illustrator. In his essay American Battle Art, Lincoln Kirstein wrote that Peixotto’s illustrations were not “stunts” made in the name of “Democracy,” but through his “observation and sense of time and place” he created images that were in the “tradition of the great reporter-draftsmen of the Civil War” for their clarity and simplicity.129 On June 1, Peixotto commenced three different trips to the front, complying with the War Department’s order for scenes of action. He documented the environs of Dijon, Is-Sur-tille, and Langres, afterwards submitting drawings of deserted towns and the effects of shell explosions. Additionally, for the families stateside, he sketched the daily life of the soldiers, including the paint shop with its camouflage equipment and weaving nets, railroad yards, the barracks for the “colored” troops, the headquarters of the Army School, a concert at the hospital, and drill hour units. With Paris secure, he went to the capital city for the July 4th Independence Day festivities, but returned to

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Remains of the village of Vaux France on July 1, 1918, after capture by 9th and 23rd Infantry of the 2nd Division, drawn by Captain Ernest C. Peixotto. Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto.

Chateau Thierry to draw a “general view,” commenting that he found “tired men …[who] were indeed tired men.” Weeks later, Mollie wrote to him that his drawings were “so excellent. I think [of]….Thierry— the broken bridge and again, the slighter one of the German pontoon bridge as a master’s work.” She ended, “Bless you for your talent.”130 In early August, Peixotto wrote to Gibson that “We are eight [artists] here on the job, stationed in a town not very far from General Headquarters.” Each of them, remarked Peixotto was “seeing different fronts on which our boys are stationed, we realize how big a proposition we are up against….The British and the French have several years in which to know the game and it will take

us a little time to strike our gait—so don’t be hard on the stuff we sent. They are treating us very well indeed allowing us the greatest freedom in doing our work so that the conditions under which we work are quite ideal.”131 Gibson replied, “glad to get your good letter….just the sort of news we have been hoping to hear. It is fun reading the newspapers these days. Good news acts as a tonic….this divide is full of business. We are head over our heels in this next Liberty Loan…” drive. Peixotto returned to his post, drawing the military images of the artillery school at Samur, transports entering the locks, the unloading of a freighter, the locomotive shops, and the unloading of equipment. In July of 1918, as the

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troops advanced into German territory, he drew Nevers and Bourges with the German Hill, the Marne, Cierges market place, a German dugout, and General Pershing entering St. Mihiel. As Peixotto came under fire more frequently, he commented, “It is out of the question to have artists at work in front line trenches or near them during active engagement.” He was now involved in the Argonne offensive beneath Hill No. 304, where he was caught in a raging crossfire. His work reflected his nervousness in the broad strokes of his pen as he witnessed the venerable chateau literally cut in two by an air bomb under an agitated sky, a scene that was pitiful and filled him with terror.132 Typing a letter to Mollie dated September 15, 1918, he told her that he had had three or four of the “most impressive days of my life.” At the “beginning of our St. Mihiel offensive I was up with one of our divisions that had one of the most difficult problems to solve.” He heard the great guns in the morning and “it was a terrible morning…noise again the great barrage… deafening…soon could the first tidings of our success and prisoners began to arrive by the hundreds. The next morning, on the 13th, the AEF…found another way around crossing what had been ‘no man’s land.’” His letter recounted his being on the bank of the Meuse, where “we saw the poor battered town….French engineers had just succeeded in getting a … foot bridge across and a few of the inhabitants who had been imprisoned in their own town for four years without any news of those they held most dear, had come across for the first time. I talked with these for a while and such stories as I heard!” He continued that he was “proud of my country and of our brave boys who had made the deliverance possible.” In this first major American offense, he relished writing that they were greeted as les Américains as field flowers were showered on Generals Petain and Pershing amidst cries of Vive la France e les Americains! As the guns roared louder and the toxicity of mustard gas threatened, the Great War that was to end all wars became no less than a “…mincing machine. Millions went in at one end and came out the other as corpses and cripples.” The largecaliber artillery guns had the power to atomize the

human body into unrecoverable mangled fragments, and every shattered bone meant infection outpacing the medical technology of the day. Naive, “[T]he…soldiers failed to understand the menace of the machine gun,” recalled Dr. Fred Albee, an American surgeon working in France. “They seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the hail of bullets.” Facial injuries and disfigurement, as well as head wounds, were the most traumatic injuries. The horrific damages rendered the soldiers unprepared to confront the world once they returned to civilian life; even more dramatically, the world was unprepared to confront them and to comfort them for their heroism. In Sidcup, England, the town painted some of its benches blue to warn the townspeople that any man sitting on one would be so disfigured he would be too distressful to view.133 In August, Peixotto noted that Committee on Public Information (CPI) had collected “photographs from official and unofficial sources at the rate of approximately a thousand pictures a day.” In return, the CPI had in their files hundreds and perhaps thousands of photographs of burned buildings, ruined towns, street scenes in French villages, bombarded churches and residences, and of extensive troop movements through French villages and cities. But no matter how the CPI attempted to “motivate” these artists, it was clear that these initial pictures were “quite lacking” in capturing the “importance and human interest” that would invoke inspiration among Americans who would view the images. The artists seemed to have been unimpressed with the opportunities they were given to be participants in this unprecedented drama, which no other previous generation of American wartime artists were given. It was rumored that Creel, Gibson, and the CPI were “so disappointed with the subject matter of these drawings, that they [considered]… hold[ing] all of the pictures received to date and await the arrival of pictures that show more action and which are more valuable for propaganda purposes in the periodical press….” According to them, the “pictures [did not] adequately portray the American soldiers in France.” In a follow-up letter of the same date,

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Peixotto wrote, “What the magazines want particularly are pictures showing the battle line activities of the U.S. troops and pictures of inspirational nature.” Peixotto understood that the CPI wanted the imagery of the night attacks and accompanying flames of colors. Peixotto’s drawings were described as having “the gentle and quiet atmosphere of the city studio. They lack action and they lack human interest.” However, some of his illustrations went to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. He had recorded scenes in such precise detail they were worthy of preservation for future generations of military engineers.134 In October, Peixotto made two trips to Argonne and Paris to draw the troops as they left these cities. He then went to draw the interior of a ruined church at Neuvilly and the German

dugouts and machine gun nests at Cheppy, an area that had sustained a heavy attack and had been pivotal in helping the Germans hold the famed Hindenberg Line. Two months later, Peixotto summarized his activities at Argonne before going to Paris, Sedan, and Luxembourg. With the armistice quickly approaching, Peixotto felt that “the signing of the armistice” would end “the period of active sketching in the field with the exception of [his making] one more trip to follow the Army of Occupation to the Rhine, with possibly a voyage to the Italian front, and to the rest of the camps of southern France....”135 He wrote to his superiors, “After my return from the Rhine, about December 15th, I should like to be stationed in Paris.” He planned to rent a studio there and wait for “whatever decision” the top brass had for the future

“Fortified Town by River,” illustration by Ernest Peixotto, France, ca. 1922. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

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work of the Official Artists. Questioning, he asked, “Does the Army wish us to continue our services as Official Artists or are we to be returned to civil life? And if the latter, when? As far as my personal inclination is concerned, I should prefer to return to America later in the winter and go back to civil life.” By early January 1919, Peixotto had rented a furnished studio in Paris on the Boulevard du Montparnasse and hoped that by the end of January that he would “complete the drawings started at the front during the last two months.” 136 On January 4, 1919, Brigadier General, General Staff, D. E. Nolan wrote to him, saying “I take great pleasure in expressing to you my appreciation, as well as that of the AEF for the valuable service which you have rendered during your stay in France. You have accomplished excellent work, under conditions which at times have been most trying.” Nolan continued, saying that his “drawings and paintings [were] already in the hands of the War College and those now in course of completion will form an important part of the permanent records of the war. Recent comments on your work have come to Rocamadour, France by Ernest C. Peixotto. my attention from the United Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto. States [and] have been most favorable.” By the beginning of February his former life, Peixotto informed his chief that Peixotto had completed twenty-eight drawings of during the past three months, he had been writing the terrain between Argonne and the Rhine, a book that was scheduled for a fall publication by which included churches, chateaux, roads, military his publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, entitled The vehicles, and street scenes. He estimated that his American Front. The illustrations were those that “work as an Official Artist” was finished and he he had made as an Official Artist and were includrequested to be sent home in March to be dised by arrangement with the War Department.137 charged stateside. As he contemplated returning to

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If Peixotto was not to be discharged in March, he hoped for one last moment of official service as the designated Official Artist commissioned to sketch the signing of the Peace Treaty at Versailles. Instead, he was offered the directorship of the Fine Arts Training Center at the Pavillion de Bellevue. The idea of an army establishing an art school for troops in the field was novel and unprecedented and the Pavillion de Bellevue, a hotel located on a hill above Sirres close to Paris gave these artistrecruits an opportunity to visit the famous studios of Bonnat, Besnard, and Cormon. Peixotto became the director-artelier of painting as part of the AEF’s educational program. Initially, Peixotto had fifty-six students under his instruction. He designed a curriculum consisting of life-classes, outdoor sketching, anatomy lectures, and engraving classes as he presented a series of illustrated lectures on the history of French painting. By April, the enrollment increased to eighty students, and in 1923 it was merged with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which had been taken over by the French Ministry. Peixotto remained as the chair of the school’s American Committee while serving as the director of the mural department of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York, a position he held from 1919 through 1926. It was further proposed that as the art center continued to be successful, he would be “demobilized” sometime in June and that he consider residing and working at his “summer home ” in Samois-sur-Seine instead of returning to the United States.138 However, Peixotto kept up his hope of being commissioned as the official artist at the Conference at Versailles.139 His superior, Donald L. Stone, Major Infantry, wrote to him, “I have had in mind for some time the question of how best to accredit you to the Peace Conference and it is a puzzling question. As you know, the Army and the American Commission to negotiate peace are quite independent of each other and there is no way, so far as I know, but which we could do this directly. The best thing that I can think of is to give you a letter of introduction to the Secretary of the American Delegation, which is enclosed herewith.” The appointment never materialized. Instead, on July 22, 1919, Peixotto was discharged at

Gievres, France. He returned to the United States on September 19, 1919 with Mollie. The war was over for him. After some months at home, Peixotto and Mollie returned to Europe with the intention of traveling to southern Spain, resuming the trip that had been interrupted by the war. During their respite on at Samois-sur-Seine, the President of France, Alexandre Millerand, conferred on Peixotto the coveted Chevalier of the Légion of Honor for his work in the war and his efforts to promote friendship between France and America. In 1926, Peixotto’s rank was elevated to Officer of the Légion of Honor. In 1934, Mollie was awarded the rank of Chevalier of the Légion of Honor for her services to France, as well as the Wilson Medal.140

Ernest and Mary Peixotto on the Normandie going to Europe. Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto.

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Governor Clinton welcomed George Washington at the foot of Wall Street for his first inauguration as President of the United States in April 1789.143 For the Bank of New York and Trust Company, Peixotto painted the mural above the mantle in the Trustees Room. Other commissions came from the Century Club, the Embassy Club, the Hispanic Museum of New York, and the Smithsonian. In 1932, when Peixotto was the president of the Mural Painters Society, he along with a number of other American artists painted three of the thirteen murals commemorating the life of George Washington. They were installed in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. 144 Back in California, Peixotto was commissioned in 1925 by William B. Bourn of Woodside, a bucolic community south of San Francisco, to paint a series of “…landscape panels for a ballroom in this Georgian country house designed by [the architect] Willis Polk….” This house is presently known as Filoli. The panels replicated Mr. Bourn’s estate, Muckross, on Lake of Killarney, Ireland, complete with scenes of the Abbey and the Lakes, which was purchased as a wedding present for their daughter in 1910. The Bourns sent Peixotto to Ireland to view the great panels in the ballroom, where Queen Victoria had once been a guest. Demonstrating his marvelous sense of playfulness, he painted himself in the lower right hand corner as he sketched the Abbey with his back to the viewer.145 Peixotto completed an ornate mural in the quattrocento Florentine villa for Timothy Spelmens of New York. It depicted Venice and the Italian Riviera. More modest murals were completed for Farris Russell of Long Island. These complimented the garden off of an elongated octagon room. This mural, as well as a series of murals for the John S. Cravens family home in Pasadena, California, functioned as a tie between the formal gardens and the interior of the house.146 Sadly, on June 24, 1925, while Peixotto was in Paris, his older brother Edgar died,147 and several weeks later his oldest brother Sidney passed away. Peixotto was in Paris when Edgar died at his Washington Street home of what the San Francisco newspapers described an “incurable” ill-

FROM ILLUSTRATOR TO MURALIST Peixotto’s earliest mural was presented at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, for which he received an honorable mention. Seven years later he was commissioned by Henry A. Everett, the brother of Sylvester Everett, the president of Cleveland Railroad, to do a mural in the family library of their Kirkland home near Cleveland, Ohio. Entitled Morte d’Arthur, the mural depicted a medieval scene of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The mural was praised for the boldness of its design and dramatized by a palette of vivid colors. Installed in 1911, Peixotto considered it his masterpiece. After completing this work, Peixotto went to Italy to sketch and study, returning to do another mural, which was exhibited at the Architectural League in New York and purchased by Charles Platt, a prominent architect for one of his clients.141 With his return to civilian life, Peixotto focused on painting murals exclusively. He created murals in theatres, hotel lobbies, and the foyer of a Fifth Avenue apartment house. But in his mind, it was the murals that he oversaw—from public libraries, schools, welfare institutions, to tax-supported public projects—that went beyond “attract[ing] the interest of art patrons.” Murals done for municipal buildings, he explained, were intended to stir “the feelings of a mass of American people who have never been stirred artistically before.” Mostly they were the works of young artists commissioned by the WPA Federal Art projects, many of whom Peixotto mentored, a mentorship that gained him a seat on Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s Art Commission. He served for five years on the Municipal Art Commission purposely to “devote a little time to inspecting the murals before tossing the bricks.” He restored the murals to reveal their true value.142 He viewed murals as purposeful expressions that evoked feelings in people as they entered and exited public buildings. On Wall Street, Peixotto completed a series of murals for the Seaman’s Bank of New York, an institution that was built on the exact site where

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Mural of the Muckross Abbey, the 14th-century Franciscan Abbey that gave the estate its name. It is believed that Ernest Peixotto, who completed all the murals in the ballroom, is seated in the lower side of the painting looking toward the Abbey. Photo by Ned Gualt. Courtesy of Filoli.

ness. Sidney died in his sleep of an “apoplectic stroke” at the summer encampment of the Columbia Park Boys’ Club on August 8, 1925.148 In Sidney’s memory, Peixotto painted a special tribute to him at the Kips Bay Boys Club at the New Building in Manhattan. As the Great Depression took its toll on artists, Peixotto helped find them work through the Art Commission of New York City, under the auspices of the WPA. From 1928 to 1936, he was president of the National Society of Mural Painters, the director of the New York Architectural League, and associate member of the National Academy, as well as the chairman of the American Committee of the school of France’s Arts at Fontainebleau and a member of the Société des Artistes Français.149

Peixotto found time to write and illustrate two more books. One was his 1922 travel book, Through Spain and Portugal, which was his last publication. The second was illustrating, in 1933, Staats Cotsworth’s book A Bacchic Pilgrimage: French Wines, an account of a journey through the winemaking regions of the Lorraine, Anjou, and Bordelais regions of France. Over the years, Peixotto had become a connoisseur of French wines.150 World War II was in the making. In December 1937, Peixotto was on stage at Carneige Hall for the American Artists Congress. The following September, Mollie was in Italy at her “Island Dream Studio.” Her friend Leslie wrote to her warning, “Do not stay too long… or you may wake

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mental in the founding of the federal arts project, asked Peixotto to join in the activities of a blind auction in October to stimulate contributions or the “buying interest” among Americans to support the president’s reelection campaign.153 As the storm clouds gathered over the United States, Peixotto continued mentoring young artists and raising money for the purchases of ambulances and mobile feeding units. Active in his work and in good health, no one foresaw his untimely death: on the evening of December 6, 1940, a coronary thrombosis claimed his life. At the moment of his passing, he was a highly respected and beloved figure in American art circles, known for simplicity, directness, and conscientiousness to his work, as well as his advancement of upcoming artists.154 A memorial service was held on January 20, 1941, at St. James Protestant Episcopal Church. It was attended by civic dignitaries and headed by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. There was an outpouring of his friends from within the art community. But as the New York Times columnist wrote, Peixotto had given “joy” to countless readers, “that of journeying with him in illustrated books over the most deletable parts of the earth. Some readers have spent hours with him in Carcassone. Some have walked with him in the streets of Lima, the city of kings; some have sauntered with him down the Dalmatian Coast, and some have had adventures in Salmanca. His art in painting, along with that in letters and in sketching, has helped many to enjoy still other cities and stretches of earth than those that are native to one’s feet.”155 His beloved Mollie outlived him by sixteen years. She continued to show her oil paintings and watercolors. She died in New York City in November of 1956.

Filoli ballroom mural painted by Peixotto. Photo by Ned Gualt. Courtesy of Filoli.

up to the sound of French guns, unless Italy stays neutral…”151 But when the war broke out, Peixotto and Mollie were in Italy and made the wretching decision to give their Fontaine home to the French authorities to house the children of the evacuees.152 Quickly they returned to New York, becoming involved in raising money for various war efforts. Hitler was on the march, and by the fall, there was no denying that the United States would be sucked into the war. The reelection of President Roosevelt was paramount. George Biddle, who was Roosevelt’s Groton classmate and had been instru-

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Ernest C. Peixotto with paintings of Italian gardens. Courtesy of Ernest D. Peixotto.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Naturalism. She has written a bilingual history, The Italians of San Francisco 1850-1930, Gl'Italiani di San Francisco and most recently A Woman of Certain Importance: The Biography of Kathleen Norris. Dr. Gumina is a psychologist in private practice in San Francisco specializing in learning disabilities.

Deanna Paoli Gumina is a native San Franciscan and a graduate of the University of San Francisco. She was the assistant archivist under Gladys Hansen, the founding Archivist of the San Francisco History Room. Dr. Gumina has published articles in the journals of California History, Pacific Historian, The Argonaut, and Studies in American

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cited as Gerdts and South, California Impressionism.] “School of Design: A Usually Excellent Exhibition,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 8, 1887, p. 6; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco. See also: Hjalmarson, Artful Players, p. 108; Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 379. [Henceforth cited as Fink, American Art NineteenthCentury Paris Salons.]

NOTES 1. Letter from Ernest Peixotto to Mary H. Peixotto, March 5, 1918. File, Orders WW I, 1918–1919, Bancroft Library, University of California. 2. Edan Milton Hughes, Artists In California 1786–1940 (San Francisco: Hughes Publishing Company, 1986), p. 430. Peixotto was contracted by Scribner’s to illustrate Theodore Roosevelt’s Oliver Cromwell but did not receive credit for his illustrations in any catalog record or bibliography. However, Peixotto’s signature is clearly legible in at least one of the illustrations. Roosevelt wrote the book shortly before becoming president in 1901. Source: Joe Bourneuf, Reference Services Manager, Widener Library, Lamont Library, Harvard University, email dated December 21, 2010.

12. Gene Hailey, Editor, Abstract from the California Art Research [Monograph of Ernest Peixotto], Works Progress Association Project 2874, O.P. 65-3-3632 (San Francisco, CA) October 1937, Vol. IX, p. 32. [Henceforth cited as Hailey, WPA.] 13. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Jesse S. Crisler, Frank Norris, A Life (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 14.

3. Lawrence Dinnean, Nineteenth-Century Illustrators of California Sights and Scenes (Berkeley: The Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1986), p. 54. [Henceforth cited as Dinnean, Nineteenth-Century Illustrator of California.]

14. Hailey, WPA, p. 31. See also: Hjalmarson, Artful Players, p. 109; Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Quiet Magic: The Still-Life Paintings of Emil Carlsen (New York: Vance Jordan Fine Art Inc., 1999), pp. 19–20.

4. Excerpts and Clippings of the Peixotto and Davis Families in deposit Western Reserve Historical Society Collection, Cleveland, Ohio.

15. Hailey, WPA, pp. 31, 32–3. See also: “A Taste for Art,” The Morning Call, Monday, July 21, 1898, North Point Gallery, San Francisco. Raymond Rush, “A California Illustrator,” The Wave, October 24, 1896; in deposit: North Point Galley, San Francisco.

5. John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Canal 1848–1869 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1943), p. 207. See also: “Crossing the Isthmus of Panama, 1849,” Introduced and Edited by Colin D, Campbell, California History, Volume LXXVIII, No. 4 (Winter 1999–2000), pp. 226–237.

16. Ernest David Peixotto, Ernest Clifford Peixotto: American Artist (Baltimore: Publish America, 2010), p. 14. [Henceforth cited as EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto.] Jeremy Cole, “Ernest Peixotto The California Days 1869–1940: Part Six,” California Book Illustrators (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1996).

6. B. P. Avery, “Art in California,” The Aldine 7 (April 1874): 72 as quoted by Anthony Kirk, “‘As jolly as a clam at high water,’ The Rise of Art in Gold Rush California,” California History, Vol. 79, No. 2, p. 199. [Henceforth cited as Kirk, “Rise of Art in Gold Rush California.”]

17. American Synagogue Papers: de Sala Pool, An Old Faith in the New World Portrait of Shearith Israel 1654–1954, p. 325; in deposit: Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.

7. Kirk, “Rise of Art in Gold Rush California”, p. 170. 8. Birgitta Hjalmarson, Artful Players: Artistic Life in Early San Francisco (Los Angeles: The Balcony Press, 1999), pp. 83–84. [Henceforth cited as Hjalmarson, Artful Players.]

18. Ibid., 7, pp. 174–6, 230. 19. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 13. 20. Lloyd P. Gartner, History of The Jews of Cleveland, Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1987), p. 10. [Henceforth cited as Gartner, Jews of Cleveland.] David D. Van Tassel, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 689. Daniel Peixotto Hays, “Daniel L. M. Peixotto, M.D.,” American Jewish Historical Society, 1918, vol. 26, p. 225.

9. Kirk, p. 195. Raymond C. Wilson, “The First Art School in the West: The San Francisco Art Association’s California School of Design,” American Art Journal, Winter 1982, pp. 44–5. [Henceforth cited as Wilson, “First Art School in the West.”] 10. Wilson, “First Art School in the West,” p. 47. See also: Stephen Mark Dobbs, “A Glorious Century of Art Education: San Francisco’s Art Institute,” The American Art Journal, Winter 1982, pp. 50–1. See also: Henry Mulford, “History of the San Francisco Art Institute: A Series Written for the Alumni Newsletter,” Alumni Newsletter, May 1978, pp. 2–15; in deposit San Francisco Art Institute Library.

21. Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds. “Judith Peixotto,” Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. II M–Z (Routledge: The Foundation for Sephardic Culture, 1998). See: http: www. mikvehisrael.org. Also: Gartner, Jews of Cleveland, p. 26, Biography of Benjamin Franklin Peixotto. Benjamin was a personable and bright man, who was active in the family business at the same time that he studied law under the tutelage of Senator Stephen Andrew Douglas. This association not only forwarded Benjamin’s prominence in politics, but it also led to his eventual appointment to

11. Will South, “In Praise of Nature,” in William H. Gerdts and Will South, California Impressionism (New York: Abbeville Publishing Group, 1998), p. 97. [Henceforth

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sensitive diplomatic posts as the United States Consul to Rumania (Romania) and then to Lyons, France.

41. “State Fair,” San Francisco Bee, p. 1; “Art for the Fair,” San Francisco Argonaut, September 18, 1893, p. 10; Sacramento Daily Record Union, September 10, 1901, p. 1; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco. See also: Gerdts and South, California Impressionism, p. 30.

22. Advertisements, Baker’s Cleveland Directory, 1864–65, Nebel Collection, Western Reserve Historical Society. 23. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 17.

42. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 63.

24. Ernest C. Peixotto, Through the French Provinces (New York: Charles Scribner, MCMIX), p. 61. See also, Will South, Guy Rose: American Impressionist (Oakland: Oakland Museum and the Irvine Museum, 1995), p. 20. [Henceforth cited as South, Guy Rose.]

43. South, “In Praise of Nature,” in California Impressionism, pp. 29, 14, 262. 44. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 94–96, 100, 120. Although Mollie reclaimed her formal name of “Mary” at the time of her marriage, in this article she has been referred to as “Mollie” based on those letters sent to her by Peixotto, family, and friends addressing her as “Mollie.”

25. Ibid., Preface. 26. Hailey, WPA, pp. 32–3. 27. Ernest C. Peixotto, Through the French Provinces (New York: Charles Scribner, MCMIX), p. 53. See also, France and California (Art Department: University of California, Davis, 1967), p. 30.

45. Gerdts, “California Impressionism in Context,” in California Impressionism, p. 29. Raymond Rush, “A California Illustrator,” The Wave, October 24,1896; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco. South, “In Praise of Nature,” California Impressionism, pp. 2, 114, 262. Rowena Meeks Abdy, et al, Six Early Women Artists: A Diversity of Style (Carmel, California: Carmel Art Association, 1991), p. 61. Richard Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 91. [Henceforth cited as Longstreth, Four Architects in San Francisco.]

28. South, Guy Rose, p. 19. 29. “A Taste for Art,” The Morning Call, Monday, July 21, 1898, North Point Gallery, San Francisco. Raymond Rush, “A Californian Illustrator,” The Wave, October 24, 1896; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco. 30. William Kostura, “San Francisco’s Italianates: Development of a Residential Style,” The Argonaut, Vol. 6, No. 2, p. 16.

46. “An Exquisite Bit,” The Wave, May 6, 1893, p. 5.

31. Fink, American Art Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons, pp. 134–5. Also see: Gail Shuman, “The Academie Julian and American (California) Artists Who Studied in Paris,” in France and California (Davis, CA: University of California Art Department, 1967), 1967), pp. 30–1.

47. Raymond Rush, “A California Illustrator,” The Wave, October 24, 1895; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 118, 149–51, 154. 48. Hjalmarson, Artful Players, pp. 201, 206–7.

32. Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, California Art: 450 Years of Painting and Other Media (Los Angeles: Dustin Publications, 1998), p. 88.

49. Doris Muscatine, Old San Francisco: The Biography of a City (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons), pp. 171–2; 228–9. [Henceforth cited as Muscatine, Old San Francisco.]

33. Fink, American Art Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons, p. 137.

50. “An End to the ‘Lark’ : A Brief History of a Freak Among Freaks,” The Wave, April 10, 1897, p. 8; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco. Warren Unna, The Coppa Murals: A Pageant of Bohemian Life in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1952), pp. 25, 41, 43. [Henceforth cited as Unna, A Pageant of Bohemian Life.]

34. Ibid., p. 379. 35. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 36–37. 36. Fink, American Art Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons, pp. 139, 379. Hailey, WPA, pp. 34, 36; EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 54. 37. The Wave, May 16, 1891, p. 7. See also: “Peixotto’s Picture,” The Wave, October 5, 1896, p. 13; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco.

51. Franklin Walker, The Seacoast of Bohemia (Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, Inc. 1973), p. 106. [Henceforth cited as Franklin, Seacoast of Bohemia.] See also: Unna, A Pageant of Bohemian Life, p. 43.

38. Hailey, WPA, p. 35; Gerdts and South, California Impressionism, pp. 26, 1 0. Vickery’s Gallery was located at 224 Post Street.

52. Hjalmarson, Artful Players, p. 66. Hailey, WPA (Carlsen), p. 35. 53. “Art and Charity: An Exposition of Famous Painting,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 26, 1891, p. 10. In deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco.

39. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 97, 102; Raymond Rush, “A California Illustrator,” The Wave, October 24, 1896; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco. See also, Fink, American Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons, p. 379.

54. Hailey, WPA, p. 36. 55. “Peixotto Going: Another Artist to Take his Departure,” San Francisco Call, September 20,1893, p. 3; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco.

40. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 61, 62.

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56. EDP, Ernest Cliffford Peixotto, p. 93.

73. Mae K. Silver, “Sidney S. Peixotto: Founder and Headworker of the Columbia Park Boys’ Club”, Western States Jewish History (July 1895, Vol. XVII, Number 4), pp. 291–302.

57. Hailey, WPA, pp. 26–7. See also, The Wave June 15, 1895, p. 8: in deposit North Point Gallery, San Francisco. 58. Gerdts, “California Impressionism in Context,” in California Impressionism, p. 30.

74. Dinnean, Nineteenth Century Illustrators of California, p. 54.

59. Walt Reed, The Illustrator in America 1860–2000 (New York: The Society of Illustrators, 2001), p. 36. [Henceforth cited as Reed, Illustrator In America.]

75. Longstreth, Four Architects in San Francisco, p. 384. 76. Sara Holmes Boutelle, Julia Morgan Architect (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), p. 24. [Henceforth cited as Boutelle, Julia Morgan.]

60. Oscar Lewis, Bay Window Bohemia (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1956), pp. 80–1, 83–4. [Henceforth cited as Lewis, Bay Window Bohemia.]

77. Mark Hopkins Institute Review, Vol. 1 No. 7, Midsummer, 1903, 29–30. New York architects praised Peixotto’s architectural drawings as the best, saying that his churches and palaces are absolutely accurate to the eye as the compass and square of the builder could make them, and yet they have all the grace of the originals in their luminous surroundings and his art work demonstrated variety through his brush and pencil doing “tricks of light.”

61. Reed, Illustrator In America, p.37. Also, The Wave, April 10, 1897; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco. 62. Walker, The Seacoast of Bohemia, p.10. 63. Letter from Eustace M. Peixotto, Brig. Gen. USA-Retired to James D. Hart, January 20, 1958, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. It was Gelett Burgess who was to have heard about the young Eustace who wrote about the Goops in the family’s magazine, Spare Minutes, which was published by Eustace’s sister, Jessica, as part of a children’s club. Eustace claims that the real originator of the Goops was his eldest brother, Sidney, who told him stories about these imaginary goops who were “skeletons who lived on an island” and were unlike those created by Burgess whose Goops were “gelantious.”

78. Ernest C. Peixotto, “Architecture in San Francisco,” The Overland Monthly, Vol. XXI (Second Series), May 1893, pp. 458, 461. [Henceforth cited as Peixotto, “Architecture in San Francisco.”] William Kostura, “San Francisco’s Italianates: Development of a Residential Style,” The Argonaut, Vol 16, No. 2, pp. 16. [Henceforth cited as Kostura, “San Francisco Italianates.”] Also, “Drawing to a Close,” San Francisco Call, Thursday, September 22, 1892, p. 6; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco.

64. Reed, Illustrator in America, p. 39. 65. Lewis, Bay Window Bohemia, p. 86. Also see, James D. Hart, A Companion to California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 336, 339.

79. Judith Waldhorn, Editor, Take A Walk Through Mission History (Stanford, University, Stanford Research Institute, 1974) 32ff. See also: James “Skip” Norfolf, “A Guide to San Francisco’s Victorians,” San Francisco Magazine, January 1978, p. 29.

66. Reed, Illustrator In America, p. 69. Also, see Letter from August Maccari, dated February 19, 1897, to Ernest Peixotto (Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley) in which the artist Maccari wrote, that the competition among magazines was so intense that Maccari switched firms when McClure’s magazine offered him a “large block of … stock …” remarking that this was reassuring because “…with it should I die my children will be provided for.”

80. Muscantine, Old San Francisco, p. 362. 81. Kostura, “San Francisco Italianates,” pp. 10, 16. 82. Peixotto, “Architecture in San Francisco,” pp. 453, 455, 457. 83. Oscar T. Shuck, History of the Bench and Bar of California (Los Angeles: The Commercial Printing House, 1901), p. 1067. San Francisco: Its Builders Past and Present, Vol. II (Chicago: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1913), pp. 8389.

67. Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1903), p. 253. 68. Reed, Illustrator in America, pp. 10, 45, 87. See also: Lewis, Bay Window Bohemia, p. 229; Letter from Ernest Peixotto to Miss Shinn, dated April 9, 1891, Paris, Ms. 1906/1, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Post Call, December 13,1891 and December 6,1891; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco.

84. Peter Robertson, [a description of Ernest Peixotto] in Out West Magazine 1903, Vol. 19, p. 133, quoted in Hailey, WPA, pp. 56–8. 85. Longstreth, Four Architects in San Francisco, p.11.

69. Hailey, WPA, p. 38.

86. Alexander T. Case, Compiled and Edited, The Annals of the Bohemian Club for the Years 1907–1972, Volume V, (San Francisco: Bohemian Club, 1972), p. 173. Clay M. Greene, Compiled and Edited, The Annuals of the Bohemian Club From the Year Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Five to Nineteen Hundred and Six Inclusive, Volume IV, (San Francisco, Bohemian Club, 1930), p. 228. See also: EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp.64-65.

70. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 156–7. 71. Ernest C. Peixotto, A Revolutionary Pilgrimage (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979), p. vii. 72. Ibid., p. vii. See also, Bailey Millard, History of the San Francisco Bay Region (Chicago: The American Historical Society, Inc., 1924) Vol. II, p. 91. 88

87. The Annuals of the Bohemian Club, Volume V, 14. See also, Hailey, WPA, p. 36.

90. Letter from Charles Warren Stoddard to Ernest Peixotto dated January 7, 1897, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

99. Judith R. Baskin, “Jessica Blanche Peixotto,” Jewish Women’s Archives: Jewish Women A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia dated 8/5/09. After graduating from the University of California as the second woman to receive a doctoral degree, Jessica became a professor of social economics and went on to serve as a member of the State Board of Charities and Corrections. She wrote The French Revolution and Modern French Socialism. She encouraged her brother, Sidney to promote the Columbia Boy’s Club.

91. Letter from Maxwell Parrish dated May 2, 1898 to Ernest Peixotto, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

100. Family history reported in the American Synagogue papers for the Spanish American War, 3 5; in deposit: Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.

92. Hailey, WPA, pp. 39–40. See also, “Lady In Yellow,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 8, 1903, p. 17; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco.

101. Letter to Ernest Peixotto from Frank Norris, August 1898, in Jesse S. Crisler, compiled and annotated, Frank Norris Collected Letters Bancroft Letter 16 (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1986), pp. 52–3.

88. The Annuals of Bohemian Club, Volume V 12,16. The Annuals of the Bohemian Club, Volume IV, p. 52. 89. Hanna Astrup Larsen, “Ernest Peixotto Tells of His Work in the Old World,” San Francisco Call, June 24, 1907 as quoted in Hailey, WPA, p. 42.

93. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 126, 130.

102. Ibid., Letter (number) 16.

94. Hailey, WPA, p. 39.

103. Ernest Peixotto, “Romanticist Under the Skin,” The Saturday Review of Literature, New York, Saturday, May 27, 1933, Volume IX, No. 45, pp. 613–15.

95. Boutelle, Julia Morgan, pp. 24–5. 96. Martin A. Meyer, Western Jewry: The Jews in California (San Francisco; Emanu-El, 1916), p. 132. [Henceforth cited as Meyer, Western Jewry.] See also: EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 13. Letter from Ernest Peixotto to Mr. Julian Leavitt, dated November 18, 1918, written as Letter to the American Jewish Committee Office of War Records, The American Jewish Historical Society Manuscript Catalog (1916–21), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. In this letter, Peixotto wrote that he had “not been a practicing Jew since my boyhood and therefore do not believe that my name should be included in your records. Trusting that you will drop my name from your list.”

104. Ernest Peixotto Papers, Diaries; in deposit: Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 105. After a long illness Raphael died on May 22, 1905. Also, Mollie’s brother, Prentiss, was lost on fishing trip in the Sierras on September 5, 1901. See Meyer, Western Jewry, pp. 132–3. 106. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 149, 125,180. 107. James Earl Jewell, Editor, The Visual Arts in Bohemia: 125 Years of Artistic Creativity in the Bohemian Club. The Annals of the Bohemian Club (San Francisco: The Bohemian Club, 1997), Volume VIII, p. 69. See also, The Annuals of the Bohemian Club For the Years 1907-1972, Volume V. Compiled and edited by Alexander T. Case (San Francisco: The Bohemian Club, 1972).

97. Henry Rand Hatfield, Essays in Social Economics: In Honor of Jessica Peixotto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), pp. 5–6, 7. 98. Letter from Eustace M. Peixotto to James D. Hart, dated January 20, 1958, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Also, Frank Norris, who was a student at the University of California, was often a guest at the Peixottos’ Sutter Street home, located in the Western Addition. Eustace remembered Norris, along with Gelett Burgess, who was then an instructor in mechanical drawing at the University and an “ex officio member” of Jessica’s and Frank’s class. Eustace remembered that his “father” was “somewhat amazed at the way Burgess would stretch himself out in comfort on the big couch” in the family library as he discussed the topics of the day with the family’s patriarch (EP 1958). But it was the dinner hour that captured the attention of the young Eustace, who had been given parental permission to eat with the “grown ups.” It was during one of these dinners that he remembered Norris’s saying that he was going to write “a novel about Polk Street.” The book was McTeague.

108. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 165. “Ernest Peixotto’s Exhibit Is Attracting Attention,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 4, 1903, p. 9. “Art Notes,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 8, 1903, p. 17; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 161, 164, 170, 178. 109. Letter from Theodore Dreiser to Ernest Peixotto, dated January 23, 1907, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 110. Mark Hopkins, p. 31. Letter April 21, 1905; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco. 111. Letter from Frederick Mortimer Clapp to Ernest Peixotto, dated October 19, 1909, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Also, Mark Hopkins pp. 28, 29–30. 112. Letter from Joseph Hawley Chapin to Ernest Peixotto, dated April 2, 1905, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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113. Ernest C. Peixotto, Romantic California (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), p. viii. Also, quoted in San Francisco: The Bay and Its Cities (1973), p. 223. See also: “Chat About Art and Artists,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 19, 1911, p. 26; in deposit: North Point Gallery, San Francisco.

130. Letter from Mary Hutchinson Peixotto to Ernest Peixotto, dated July 1, 1918 and 6 about 1918, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

114. Hailey, WPA, pp. 43, 46.

132. Memo from Ernest Peixotto, September 19, 1918, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See also: Hailey, WPA, p. 49.

131. Letter from Ernest Peixotto to Charles Dana Gibson, dated August 7, 1918, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

115. San Francisco Call, June 8, 1912 as quoted in Hailey, WPA, pp. 45–6. 116. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 200, 282, 291. Mary Hutchinson Peixotto notes, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

133. Caroline Alexander, “Faces of the War,” Smithsonian, February 2007, Vol. 37, No. 11, p. 79. See also, Caroline Alexander, “The Shock of War,” Smithsonian, September 2010, Volume 41, No 5, p. 58ff.

117. George Creel, How We Advertised America, 1920, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Creel” See also: Jane Whitehead, “Picturing America How Artists Reported the News—Or Tried to—in the Years Before Photography,” Boston College Magazine (Summer 2009 vol 69, No 3), 14ff.

134. Letters from Official Artists to Ernest Peixotto, August 5, 1918, August 13, 1918, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See also, Hailey, WPA p. 50. 135. Letter from Ernest Peixotto to Commanding Officer, December 1, 1918, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

118. Ernest Peixotto Papers, World War I, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

136. Letter from Ernest Peixotto to Commanding Officer, January 3, 1919, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

119. Hailey, WPA pp. 47, 48–50 quotes Adeline Adams in the Magazine of Art, Vol 12, p 121. 120. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 285, 27.

137. Letter from Ernest Peixotto to Commanding Officer, May 3, 1919 Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

121. Seriously Ill EP Condition Critical,” San Francisco Call, June, 8,1912, p. 1.

138. Hailey, WPA, pp. 47–8. See also: George Creel, How We Advertised America.

122. Ernest Peixotto Papers, File, Orders WWI 1918-1919, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, p. 145. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 278–9.

139. Letter from Ernest Peixotto to Donald L. Stone, Major Infantry, dated May 10, 1919, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

123. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 281. 124. Letter from Ernest Peixotto April 12 (42nd Division) and April 30, 1918, Office of the Provost Marshall, Coblenz December 12, 1918 and August 19, 1919, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

140. “American Artist, For War Work and the Promotion of Friendship between France and the United States,” New York Times, April 29, 1921. See also, “France Honors E. C. Peixotto,” New York Times June 27, 1921, 12, c. 7. See also: EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 324.

125. Memo series, Ernest Peixotto, April 17, 1918 to December 28, 1918, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

141. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 198. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Peixotto on the mural, Morte d’Arthur. See also: Portner Garnett, “News of Art and Artists,” San Francisco Call, (September 1, 1912), p. 32.

126. Bailey Milliard, History of the San Francisco Bay Region (Chicago: The American Historical Society, 1924), p. 91. 127. Memo from Ernest Peixotto to Commanding Officer, May 18, 1918, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

142. “Ernest C. Peixotto” clipping, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

128. Letter from Ernest Peixotto to Major General Haan, dated May 25, 1918, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

143. At that time, New York was the capital of the young republic headquartered two blocks from Wall Street. 144. Hailey, WPA, p. 56. “American Mural Painting Represented in Washington Galaxy,” The Art Digest, February 15, 1932, p. 5. See also: EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 355, 366–9.

129. Memo from Ernest Peixotto to Commanding Officer, First American Troops Crossing the Rhine: Vincennes, Seine, November 1918, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Clipping, Lincoln Kirstein, American Battle Art: 1588–1944, p. 185.

145. Timmy Gallagher, The Gardens At Filoli (San Francisco: Pomegrante Artbooke, 1994), 16–7. See also: EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 349.

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146. “Mural Paintings By Ernest Peixotto,” American Magazine of Art (April 1930), Vol. 21, p. 236. 147. “E. D. Peixotto, Lawyer, Civic Leader, Dies,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 25, 1925, p. 3. “Death Claims E. D. Peixotto,” San Francisco Examiner, June 23, 1925, p. 1. 148. “S. S. Peixotto Park Boys’ Leader Dies,” San Francisco Examiner, August 8 1925, p. 1. See also, “Sidney S. Peixotto: Founder and Headworker,” Western States Jewish History, p. 293. 149. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 394. 150. Hailey, WPA, p. 47. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, p. 163. 151. Letter to Mary Hutchinson Peixotto from Leslie (no last name), dated September 27, 1938, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 152. EDP, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, pp. 439–40. 153. Letter to Ernest Peixotto from George Biddle, National Committee of Independent Voters for Roosevelt and Wallace, dated October 25, 1940, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 154. “Ernest C. Peixotto, Mural Painter, 71,” New York Times, December 7, 1940, Vol. 17 no. 3. “Peixotto Rites Tomorrow,” New York Times, December 10, 1940, Vol. 25 no. 6. “A Peixotto Memorial,” New York Times, December 14, 1940, p. 12. 155. “Ernest Peixotto,” New York Times, January 20, 1941, p. 14.

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