Biography
Landscape painter, illustrator. Born in Medoc, MO on January 9, 1879, Sayre worked in the lead and zinc mines and manufactured leather goods before settling on an art career. He remained a self-taught artist except for two months with J. Laurie Wallace in Omaha. His first creative job as an artist was an employee of and engraving company in Houston, TX. Ill with diphtheria, he moved to California in 1917. Traveling to California by train, he was enchanted with the Southwest desert and vowed to return which he did in 1919. For three years he lived in Arizona working for a mining company as a bookkeeper while painting in his leisure. Upon returning to California in 1922, he held his first art exhibition of 64 watercolors in San Francisco; later that year he exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In that year he moved to Los Angeles and two years later built a home and studio in Glendale where he remained for the rest of his life. Sayre is one of California’s best known painters of the deserts and the Southwest. Member: Pallete & Chisel Club of Chicago; Painters & Sculptors of Los Angeles (cofounder and President, 1929) Exhibited: Bohemian Club, 1922; Glendale Chamber of Commerce, 1922 (solo); Glendale Public Library, 1962 (retrospective) Works Held: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Source: Hughes, Edan Milton, "Artists in California: 1786-1940," San Francisco: Hughes Publishing Company, 1989.)
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Biography
A native of New York and the son of an engraver, James David Smillie earned his early reputation for his etching skills but later for watercolor landscapes. He began etching at age 8, learning from his father, James Smillie (1807-1885). At age 14, he did a set of plates illustrating John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost. He had a job as a bank note engraver, and then he and his father had a business, collaborating as engravers with a specialty of bank-notes. They also did the engravings for the 1857 Mexican Boundary Survey Report. James David Smillie helped organize the New York Etching Club, and he was the U.S. representative to supply examples of American etchers' work to the Painters-Etchers Society of London. Although he continued working with etching, drypoint, aquatint and lithography, in 1865, he began doing landscape painting and was especially interested in mountain scenery. Smillie traveled in California in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in Colorado in the Rocky Mountains, and in the eastern United States in the Catskills and Adirondacks. From these trips he did illustrations that were published in 1872 in the magazine Picturesque America. In 1881, Smillie got married, and the couple had two sons. By 1884, he was in France, and spent much time there doing prints of landscapes, figures, portraits and cityscapes. Between 1888 and 1896, he produced a set of drypoint floral still-life prints. James David Smillie founded the American Watercolor Society and served as president and treasurer. He also taught classes at the National Academy of Design in 1868 and from 1894 to 1903.
Richard DeTreville was born in Beaufort, South Carolina on November 17, 1864 into a prominent, old family of French ancestry. His grandfather fought with George Washington in the Revolutionary War and at the time of his birth during the Civil War, his father was Lt Governor of South Carolina. Little is known about his art training; he was possibly self-taught. In 1892 he moved to California and settled in Stockton where he established a small newspaper called Det's Magazine. Shortly after 1910 he moved from Stockton to San Francisco where he worked as a cartoonist for the Park Presidio News. In his studio on Clement Street he exhibited his paintings as well as in local department stores and art galleries. His works were handled locally by Schussler Brothers and Sanborn & Vail. The last few years of his life were spent across the bay in Alameda where he died on February 25, 1929. DeTreville worked in oil and, on rare occasions, in watercolor. He was known to be an excellent portraitist although his portraits are rare. The most prolific of early California painters, his thousands of small landscapes are invariably of the San Francisco Bay area, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and northern California. He sometimes signed his works "DeT". Member: American Art Bureau. Exhibited: White House Department Store (San Francisco), 1926 (250 oils). Works held: California Historical Society; Oakland Museum; Alameda Historical Society.
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Artists Biography,
Born in Denver, CO on Aug. 7, 1897, Curtis was a resident of Seattle before moving to Los Angeles in 1914. He was inspired to become an artist by his teacher Rob Wagner at Manual Arts High School. After working as a bank teller and serving in WWI, he soon was able to support himself as an illustrator. He served as official artist of the U.S. Antarctica Expedition in 1939-40 and again in 1957. About 1960 he changed his residence from Los Angeles to Twenty Nine Palms, California, with summers in Moose, Wyoming. An avid mountain climber, his studio in the Grand Tetons was a rustic log cabin. In 1972 he moved to Carson City, Nevada, where he remained until his demise on March 17, 1989. He is best known for his landscapes of the High Sierra, Grand Tetons, and Antarctica. His works won dozens of medals and prizes from the early 1920s in southern California shows.
