He could also be blunt and satirical. When an admirer at on of his shows compared his wok to Rembrandt, he replied “Why drag Rembrandt into a conversation.” In the 1920’s he was down at Venice beach, and spotted a sign advertising the painter LeFabre, “Great Belgian Artist.” Smith paid his dime to enter and see an illuminated life-size nude, about which the barker gave a long spiel recounting how this beautiful courtesan ruined the life of several kings, princes, and finally caused the suicide of the artist himself. “That’s bolony,” said Jack. The man glared at Smith, asking what he meant. “I painted the picture myself in the old Temple Block” responded the work’s real creator.
In early 1930 Norman Rockwell, magazine illustrator, turned up in the artist’s colony. Rockwell, just divorced, was fleeing a threatened Hearst lawsuit against him, and he took Mr. Lorimer’s advice to “hideout—get out of town.” Naturally, the person who often pulled the strings in Norman’s life, Clyde Forsythe, happened to be in New York with his wife. He advised Norman to come out to the coast with them, and the three got on the 20th Century Limited. All across country Clyde and Cotta talked about a pretty and young Alhambra grade school teacher they wanted Norman to meet, a Mary Pickford type named Mary Barstow, whose family lived at 125 Champion Place.
Dinner was arranged at the Forsythe home, where the couple met, and Norman asked her out for a subsequent date. She declined due to a prior engagement, and rebuffed, pursued his painting... He painted one of Mary’s neighbor’s children, a young boy scout, Johnny Moreau, who lived on the street, and he did a cover using the young Cary Cooper as a model. Mary’s prior appointment had merely been a PTA meeting or the like, and Norman asked her out again, and two weeks later they were engaged. “Mary and I were married on April 17, 1930, in the garden of her parent’s home in Alhambra.”
The Alhambra –Post-Advocate reported that Mary, in an “Avalon green crepe” gown was wed to “the foremost cover artist in America,” in the garden of the Barstow home beneath the old pepper and eucalyptus trees. There was a stringed orchestra playing for 150 guests, including many local artists, and, of course the best man was Clyde Forsythe.
They went back east to live, although Norman would visit the colony regularly with Mary through the years. In early summer of 1930 Mary posed for a “Post” cover showing an estranged and uncommunative young couple at the breakfast table, the husband buried in the newspaper, the wife ignored, drinking a cup of tea or coffee. When the cover appeared August 23, 1930, one of Mary’s friends wrote expressing her sympathy that her marriage to Norman was breaking up. Such was the impact of a Rockwell cover. This cover might have more reflected his first marriage, for his marriage to Mary, who gave birth to the three Rockwell sons, was most idyllic and successful, and lasted for nearly thirty years until Mary’s untimely death in 1959.
The next great creative spirit to arrive on Artist’s Alley was the internationally known sculptor, Eli Harvey. Harvey and his wife Edith cam to visit the Johnson’s who had been their neighbors on Charles Street in New York. Harvey, whose works are in museums, libraries, and public buildings throughout the world, had created animal sculptures for the Bronx Zoo and Central Park, the eagles for General Pershing’s Triumphal Arch, the original elk for the Order of Elks, and the famous replica of J.C. Penny’s bull, “Foremost.”
Harvey had previously announced his desire to settle in California, and while at the Johnson’s he spotted a lot up the street. Although nearly 70 years old, he defied anyone’s notion that he was about to retire, with his announcement that he would design and construct a home, and a sculpture studio. Noting the slope of the ground towards arroyo, he said this “made it possible to have a high studio in the rear…” the villa that Eli Harvey built near the cul-de-sac at 130 Champion Place is still the most imposing house on the street.
As a life-long Quaker, Harvey was aware that art was considered to be “vanity and vexation of spirit.” Early in his life he reconciled his art and religion. Born in Adams Township in Clinton County, Ohio, on September 23, 1860, as a child Eli was confronted by his father when he was attempting his first drawing, inquiring “Eli, would thee rather do that than work?” “I think I am working harder than thee is…” Eli replied. Eli continued to work hard, he cut beech tree and sold a cord of stove wood to earn the $1.25 it would take to buy a pair of skates he wanted, but in the local store where the skates where sold he spotted a set of watercolors for the same amount, and he bought them instead. With this set of paints he sought the commissions of relatives and neighbors to paint portraits of them, not to hang on their own walls as a sign of vanity, he argued, but for loved ones far distances away, to help them remember them. He did a series of these portraits, receiving $75.00 for each one.
From such ingenious beginnings would emerge a classically trained artist, who first studied at MacMichen University Art School and the Academy of Fine Arts in Cincinnati. Then in 1889 he studied in Paris under Constant, LeFebre, and Doucet. His first love of painting evolved into an interest in sculpture, and in Paris he studied under “animalier”, Emanuel Fremiet.
Fremiet, the world’s most distinguished animal sculptor, was impressed with Eli’ assiduous study of the anatomy of his subjects, for at hours length, he would examine the skeletons of the animals he loved so much. He became so friendly with some of the wild animals he sculpted over the years that he could scratch the head of a lion, or lie under a bull to further study the anatomy. Working with J.C. Penny’s bull “Foremost” Eli plied him with apples, petted him, and talked to him while he made his model. In his replicas of bears, lions, pumas, jaguars, and elephants “he strove not only for accuracy of detail”, said his wife Edith, “but for an inner consciousness of the animal itself.”
By 1901 he received a major commission to do the sculpture for the Lion House at the New York City Zoo. Residing at 50 Charles Street, Eli used to walk his dog Adonis in Washington Square Park. Harvey had selected the greyhound as a puppy for a model, and he wrote of his pet; “The prime expression of line and action is one of pride as if to say to his master, ‘Look at me and admire me enough to model my beauty?’ This I did.” Another statue of Adonis was praised by the New York Times: “It is full of life and yet suggests the formal seated effigies of the Egyptian god Anubis. More could not be done for a human being.”
Sam Hyde Harris Studio Circa 1975
Sam Hyde Harris Circa 1972