road residence in San Marin) that Clyde would create the landscapes whose Hallmark to art patrons would be “the Forsythe sky… the Forsythe clouds…the Forsythe prospector and jackasses.” Forsythe, with Maynard Dixon and Jimmy Swinnerton became one of the pioneer painters of the desert. He said of the desert: “To those who do not know it, the desert may mean a land of drab and barren waste; to those who have walked alone in its silence, it is a land of opal beauty, infinite peace and grandeur…”
Johnson sold more paintings in California than he ever did in New York. He sold to director James Cruze, Douglas Fairbanks, and William Wrigley. His net sales for 1926 were $21,728. The move to California would mark his complete independence from illustrating as a source of a livelihood. Frank Tenney Johnson was destined for painting superstardom, in his own time, and posthumously. Today his paintings sell in the five and six figure bracket. By the late 1920’s and the 1930’s the Johnson’s were prospering, and they maintained homes and studios simultaneously in New York, Wyoming, and Alhambra. In the West, the land of his boyhood dreams, Frank pursued fine art exclusively, and on Champion place he reached the apogee of his career.
In 1925 in Los Angeles Frank was commissioned to do the work which would attracted his widest audience, and which would be for millions of persons, over several decades, their first glimpse of his art—the murals and drop curtain of the Carthay Circle Theater. Much of the lofty grandeur of this theater was the result not only of the architecture of Dwight Gibbs, but the mighty depiction of the “Donner Party Crossing High Sierras”, 30 by 40 feet on the asbestos curtain, and two 18 by 11 foot paintings left and right of the stage, “The Miners” and “The Indians.”
Following his success they bought the house at 22 Champion Place, and Frank built a two story studio with a two story glass window allowing ideal north light. There was a fireplace and an inset for displaying works to prospective buyers. On the walls were Indian buckskins, Navajo rugs, and other native costumes he had collected. In this studio and along the creek they threw parties which attracted such persons as Max Wieczorek, crayon portraitist, Kathryn W. Leighton, painter of the Blackfoot Indians, Mrs. Charles M. Russell, widow of the great painter, Edward Borien, painter and etcher, Dean Cornwell, internationally known muralist (known in Los Angeles for his murals in the Rotunda of the Los Angeles Public Library), Charles Wakefield Cadman, composer, and many more. It is reputed that movie stars. Tim Mix, Gloria Swanson, Will Rogers (who was a friend of several of the artists) came to the colony.
Johnson was more prolific than ever in his studio, and he won prizes, honors, and his greatest praise during his Champion Place years. He accumulated scrapbooks thick with good notices; in March 1928 Fred Hogue wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Remington is dead…Russell is dead. When Johnson is gone, the last of the trilogy of the trail and the range will have passed…as a painter of nocturnes, Frank Tenney Johnson is the peer of any artist.” A noted art authority, recently commented that only Parrish and Whistler proximated Johnson’s facility in nocturnes. On April 28, 1937 his greatest honor came, he was designated National Academician, allowing him to sign “N.A.” to his works.
Frank worked harder, and he expressed a sense of destiny about his art: “Vanishing so fast – so fast—the Old West! It makes me feel I have not a minute to waste. I must get it all on canvas before it’s too late!”
Johnson’s next door neighbor was one of the most popular and respected figures on the California art scene, the New Jersey born, Chicago and Cincinnati trained landscapist, Jack Wilkinson Smith. Smith studied under the great American realist Frank Duveneck; apprenticed as a scenic muralist in Chicago, and gained some attention with his front line sketches of the Spanish-American War, in the Cincinnati Inquirer.
About 1890 Jack Smith had worked and studied in Chicago, taking classes at the Chicago Art Institute around the same time that several future California artists conned their lessons, Landscapist Edgar Payne and William Wendt, and Dean Cornwell. At age 17 he worked as a scenic paint boy, and during his lunch hours, he ate quickly, and then ran down to the windows of Devoe and Reynolds, to gaze at the works of William Wendt, who would become the master painter of southern California landscape.
Jack’s employer sent him out to assist an artist named Devine, who had a commission to paint some window settings for one of Chicago’s largest department stores. Devine, having a deadline, labored day and night, keeping young Jack overtime, despite his pleas for a night off. One night having a dance date he was set on keeping, Jack short circuited the lights with a hammer and exited to the dance. Not until twenty years later on a sketching expedition in Laguna did the boss and his assistant meet again. Smith looked at the California artist, George Gardner Symons, and asked “Why did you call yourself Devine?”, “and why did you blow out the lights, you young rascal?” retorted Symons.
From 1906 on he was an activist painter. Startled by the snobbishness of Los Angeles galleries towards regional artists, Smith helped found the California Art Club, and then the Ten Painters Club (with Guy Rose, William Wendt, and Edgar Payne). He was the chief mover behind the Biltmore Galeria which opened in 1923, and he organized Painters of the West, limited to twenty top artists, including three from the Alhambra colony (himself, Johnson, and Forsythe).
Jack Smith had half a dozen studios in Los Angeles before settling on 16 Champion Place for his permanent home. He lived on the street for 23 years except for his wide ranging sketching trips. No California explorer knew the terrain as well as he did. His painting titles indicated the breadth of his travels—“San Jacinto Hills”, “Oregon’s Fog Veiled Coast”, “In the High Sierras”, “Del Norte Coast.” The latter, which illustrated the cover of the June 1928 Touring Topics, a surging and steaming ocean and rocks off the Redwood Highway, is a scene Winslow Homer might have rendered if he had painted the Pacific.
In forty years Smith traveled every road and trail in the West. The magazine article said that if the Auto Club couldn’t tell someone a route to follow, call Jack Wilkinson Smith of Alhambra who had taken “every cart-track, trail and cow path on the Pacific Coast…” He boasted of having “cast a fly into every stream and lake” between Mexico and Oregon.
Smith remembered by one of his students as a great man and great artist. She recalls his demeanor as “serious, like a doctor.” And “generous”, one who gave free lessons to those who couldn’t afford them. His protégé recalls him as “a natural artist who could pick up a brush and paint anything with feeling and intense beauty . . . Everyone respected him as an artist but mostly as a beautiful soul.”
Clyde Forsythe Circa 1942