In Art History courses one learns about an independent group of painters active in New York after the turn of the century, called "the Eight"-- names like Henri, Sloan, Luks, Glackens, and others-- later tabbed the "Ash Can School" because of the proletarian content and realistic subjects depicted. They banded together to exhibit and sell their works as well as socialize and express their ideas. They found themselves fighting the stuffy art Establishment when they attempted to paint what they wanted to paint; their immediate surroundings, and the impact of the American scene.
At the identical time in Southern California scores of artists were arriving on the scene, and became involved in frenetic activity which was to burgeon as the school of California landscape(sometimes narrowly referred to as the "Eucalyptus School"), Western art, and desert painting. By the middle 1920's and 1930's eight of these artists formed a unique bond, and one can casually borrow the term "the Eight" to describe this group and their colony. They too were realistic painters with divergent styles, who worked and played together, fought an insipient snobbery of the local galleries, and most of all proclaimed their environment, California and all of the West. But what truly bound this group of eight together was the street where they lived and worked--Champion Place-- a rustic lane, a short and narrow cul-de-sac outside of Los Angeles, in the city of Alhambra in the San Gabriel valley.
Who were these artists of this nearly forgotten colony? America’s most famous magazine cover illustrators, Norman Rockwell; Frank Tenney Johnson, who with Russell and Remington forms the triumvirate of painters of the Old West, and who was “the master of the nocturne”; Jack Wilkinson Smith, Johnson’s neighbor at 16 Champion Place, he “the master of California sunlight”; Eli Harvey and Tex Wheeler, sculptors; Clyde Forsythe, cartoonist and desert artist; Sam Hyde Harris, landscapist and desert painter, and Marjorie Reed, whose continuing “life-long painting project6” is her magnificent depictions of the Butterfield Overland Stage Route from San Francisco to Tipton, Missouri.
Just off Main Street where Alhambra becomes San Gabriel, a short distance from the Mission San Gabriel, it is still a sylvan locale. A Street of distant country charm, with traditional homes and wooden California bungalows facing a narrow lane densely treed with palms, eucalyptus, and oleander hedges. On the artist’s side of the block, in the rear of the homes, the studios hang over the slope of the north branch of what the first Spanish scouts called the Arroyo de San Pasqual, amidst a grove of eucalyptus, with the backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains. Down in the terraced back yards, where artists and students painted, and the famous use to congregate, it has changed little in fifty years, except for the cement channel girding the stream, now called the Alhambra Wash.
Certainly no other block in the West, composed of no more than three studios--the salons of 16, 22, and 130 Champion Place--was more of an artist's mecca than this street which was known locally as "Artist's Alley or “Little Bohemia.” The homes at 16 and 22 Champion Place were originally built for Champions, children of Seth and Lucienda Champion who came to Alhambra from '\Wisconsin in 1886. They purchased this section of the Alhambra tract which had been founded by Benjamin D. Wilson. Members of the Champion family have lived on this lane from the turn of the century until the present day.
In January of 1977 the last of the “Champion Place Group” to maintain a studio on the block painted one more time from the 16 Champion Place studio he had taken over after Jack Wilkinson Smith's death, and with Sam Harris' death on May 30, 1977 at age 88, the direct link of painting on the street in Alhambra was broken.
Sam Hyde Harris, commercial artist turned desert painter, was already drawing American western scenes in his native Brentford, England, at the age of twelve (his widow Marion Dodge Harris has his first sketch done in 1902 of two horses tied to a post), perhaps anticipating his family's move to America shortly thereafter, and young Sam’s arrival in California in 1904 at age fifteen. Half of Sam’s seven decades in California were spent as a commercial artist-- he did railroad posters, now all collector’s items, and he carefully searched for “the right shade of delft blue” for the windmill he drew as the trademark for Van De Kamps stores.
Entering his studios at 16 Champion Place, less than a year after Hyde’s death, over fifty years since Jack Smith built it for himself, the time lapse is voided-- in the cool ambiance of the artist’s den light filters through the window over canvases, brushes, oils, lining the walls are fragments of the past—a framed sketch by Frank Tenney Johnson; Will Foster illustrations, a Jack Smith oil; and in the corner a large easel which belonged to William Wendt. Hundreds of Hyde’s works prevail; on the easel, “Smoke Tree at La Quinta”, along the walls “Baja Scene”, La Quinta Afternoon”, “Utah Rabbit Brush”. Best known for his desert scenes, he also included some man made evidence-- “Chavez Ravine” in 1940, combines the desolate and the urban, a plaintive portrayal of a place replete in Los Angeles’ society history, today’s Dodger Stadium.
As an ebullient teenager on the local art scene in 1904, Sam was befriended by some older artists who were on their way to becoming classic painters of California, Hanson Puthuff and William Wendt. In Puthuff’s 52nd street and Meridian Avenue studio in Highland Park the Art’s Students League was formed, as well as the Painter’s Club in 1906 and the California Art Club, organized by Puthuff, Wendt, Smith, and Harris. $1500 was raised, and Puthuff and Hyde sought a site for the club, picking the hill location on Alvarado Street, where St. Vincent’s Hospital was finally built. The club never found a permanent home, but out of these clubs evolved the Museum of History, Science, and Art, in exposition Park in 1913, and from these beginnings can clearly be traced the genesis of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
If there was a founder of the Alhambra colony it was Victor Clyde Forsythe, born in Orange, California in 1885. His family moved to Los Angeles and lived near Eighth and Figueroa
Streets. The surrounding hills and the Los Angeles River was still bucolic and full of wildlife, and young Clyde became an outdoor enthusiast. A family vacation at age 14 to San Francisquito Canyon Canyon, Elizabeth Lake and the high desert of the Antelope Valley began his love affair with the desert,. Clyde's love of nature coincided with his early artistic instincts, and by 1904 he was sent to New York to study at the Art Students League As the 18 year old looked out the window of the Santa Fe train on his first trip away from his native California, so much emotion overwhelmed him that he seized his brushes and paints, and as the train wound through the Cajon Pass he hastily did a sketch of the desert to take east with him. He saved that sketch for the rest of his life.
Clyde pursued his studies at the Art Students League in the stimulating NewYork art scene of the period. He workes as a cartoonist for the New York Journal at 8 dollars a week, and he made a living doing illustrating and advertising, among the latter was a barn and billboard ad for Bull Durham Tobacco of a large domestic bull. He soon became prosperous and well known as the cartoonist “Vic”, creator of "Joe Jinks", "Joe’s Car", and “Way Out West.” For THE World he illustrated horse races, prize fights, murder trials, while mixing socially with the likes of Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, Charles Dana Gibson, and Bat Masterson. He created one of the most famous World War I posters, showing a victorious American doughboy, with the caption exclaiming “And They Thought We Couldn’t Fight.”
Clyde befriended two aspiring artists, a New York City boy, Norman Rockwell, and a country boy from Iowa, Frank Tenney Johnson. Clyde and Norman decided to share a studio in new Rochelle, and appropriately, it was the old studio of Western master, Frederic Remington. This 30 year old westerner, Clyde, while turning out his cartoons, took this 21 year old city boy under his wing and persuaded him that he could do better than the mere output of black and white illustrations for children's magazines and dime novels. Norman less assertive than his California friend despaired of ever making a name for himself. "Who'd ever heard of me besides a lot of kids?" When Rockwell depreciated his work, Clyde would say “What're you moaning about?… Get off your hands and knees and work. You'll make it…” Clyde urged him to take his portfolio to adult magazines. Norman did want to do a cover for the SATURDAY EVENING POST, but was afraid of rejection and of the Post's editor, “the great Mr. George Horace Lorimer.” “Do a cover. What the hell, you’re as good as anybody” shouted Clyde.
Norman first tried to create a Gibson type cover of a high society couple in evening dress. "Crud, crud” said Clyde, "do what you're best at. Kids…they don't want warmed-over Gibson.” On May 20, 1916, Norman Rockwell first cover painting of children appeared on the front of the SATURDAY EVENING POST. In his memoirs Rockwell wrote “I didn’t start the vogue for
Post covers of kids, Clyde Forsythe did…”
Clyde’s friend from Iowa, Frank Tenney Johnson, had first come to New York when he was age 20, with $225 he had inherited. He enrolled in the Art Student's League, studying under John Henry Twachtman. His money ran out after five months, and he returned to Milwaukee where he had commenced his art career after having spent his first 14 years on a prairie farm in Iowa. There his father had raised cattle and crops, and Frank recalled he watched the stagecoaches and prairie schooners passing on the way to the West, "through Council Bluffs and across the Missouri.”
Following his mother's death, the family moved to Milwaukee. Soon Frank quit high school--"I apprenticed myself to an old panorama painter”. This was F.W. Heine, former staff artist in the Franco-Prussian War, whose specialty was horses. A greater influence was Richard Lorenz, a German immigrant painter whom Frank studied under, and who had traveled in the West painting horses, Indians, and the terrain. In the 1890's Frank in his first trip into South Dakota Indian country, found the ingredients of his life's work: Indians, plains and mountains, horses and cowboys.
On December 31, 1896 he married Vinnie Reeve Francis. They moved to New York where Frank studied at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri and William Merrit Chase. He went to work for FIELD AND STREAM who sent him on a trip to Colorado and the Southwest. Back in New York he did cover for this magazine as well as illustrations for Zane Grey novels, COLLIER'S, and Doubleday books. Vinnie started throwing studio parties which led to some sales of paintings through dealers. In 1917 they moved to 48 Charles Street, Manhattan, bought a Model T, and made their first trip to California.
Clyde and Frank had met as fellow illustrators, and both were members of the Salmagundi Club in New York. By the early 1920's Clyde and his wife Cotta had resettled in California. He had reached a peak of financial success in the East, and was homesick for the simple life of his native state. In 1921 the Johnson's made a second trip to California, and Frank took the first of many trips with Clyde into the desert and mountains. Forsythe introduced Frank's work to the Stendahl Galleries at the Ambassador Hotel. Before long, the always persuasive Clyde, talked them into California life. For the next couple of summers Frank and Vinnie made their headquarters at 29, S. Fourth Street, Alhambra, not far from far from the Forsythe1s home on the corner of Almansor Avenue and Alhambra Rood. It was from this studio (and later Champion Place and his St. Albans
Jack Wilkinson Smith Circa 1932
Photo by Paul O'Farrell