Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932) began wintering and painting in California in 1902 and settled permanently in Santa Barbara in 1915.
In their book, De Forest’s Santa Barbara, Frank Goss and Jeremy Tessmer of Sullivan Goss—An American Gallery, write, “What did de Forest find here in Santa Barbara? It seems that he found most of the better trappings of early 20th century civilization without all of the people. He also found a landscape that has since inspired legions of landscape painters and even more tourists.” The city was small but sophisticated. The landscape and the light continue to be unique—encompassing the sea, mountains and the desert—subjects that had attracted him when he lived in New York and on his peripatetic journeys in Europe and Asia.
He had painted along the Nile, with his great uncle Frederic Church on the Acropolis and on the coast of Maine where he had a home.
On a later trip to Greece, he acquired and was photographed in Greek garb, a custom among travelers in the 19th century, to increase the emotional experience of visiting and immersing oneself in another culture and its history. It demonstrated his intense taste for the exotic.
His meditative vignettes of the California coast are in contrast to his role in the elaborate life of the Gilded Age in New York where he was an interior and furniture designer. He was in business with Louis Comfort Tiffany and designed interiors for Andrew Carnegie’s mansion in New York which is now the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. His friend, the author Rudyard Kipling, said de Forest’s home in New York was “one of the very luxurioustest houses I’ve ever seen.”
On an extended honeymoon in India, de Forest contracted to have elaborately carved panels made and shipped to New York where he would incorporate them into western-style furniture. He also designed chased brass cutouts based on Indian motifs which he used on furniture and interior architecture.
As a painter, he had been trained in the detailed depictions of the landscape typical of the Hudson River School. His spontaneous depictions of Monterey and the West are a departure. Frank Goss notes that de Forest “became sort of an anti-detailist,” adding that he sought out “common views of the most simple and elegant things in life.”
He seldom depicted the architecture or significant geographic features of the region. In her essay for the book De Forest’s Monterey, published by Sullivan Goss, Julianne Burton-Carvajal writes, “Unlike so many other artists of the day, there are no de Forest paintings known that document the hotel, gardens, lighthouse, Custom House, old adobes, Asilomar, the lodge, the emerging Carmel community, or the Mission. The artist seems to have been drawn to the most remote, least populous areas.”
She continues, “In the competitive tension between unbounded vistas, fleeting characteristics of light and atmosphere, and what could be swiftly rendered in small format, de Forest found a perpetual challenge. Each of his compact paintings records an ephemeral effect of light and atmosphere as registered on a distinctive assembly of landforms, sky, foliage, and bodies of water…The paperboard’s dimensions—nine and three quarters by fourteen inches—represented de Forest’s personal golden mean. Indeed, he theorized that arm’s length was the ideal distance from which to view as well as to compose a landscape.”
The first de Forest painting that attracted my attention was “Point Lobos” Veteran Tree (Monterey), January 29, 1911. The lone Monterey cypress has clung resolutely to the cliff for several hundred years. The painting is, at first, visually appealing—then I was impressed by the tree’s solitude. The horizon line matching the horizontal line of the lower branches of the tree is countered by the strong diagonal dividing the green hill from the blue ocean. Then, there are the varieties of greens and blues. The white foam of the crashing surf is ominously silent in the painted scene. Today, the Veteran Tree is a wounded veteran having lost half its breadth due to age and drought.
The composition is similar to that of a painting done nine years later, Poppies and Lupine on Windswept Monterey Coast (Carmel), May 3, 1920. The weathered, gnarled trunk of a dead tree stands out among those that are living.
As I saw more of his paintings I was struck by the lone trees—even when there are many, they are separate. De Forest painted frequently at the Grand Canyon. In Grand Canyon, 1910, a larger studio painting at 25 by 36 inches, the lone trees grasping the rock distract the eye from the vastness of the canyon.
Even today, with Santa Barbara having grown from a population of around 7,000 when de Forest arrived, to over 90,000, and with tourist traffic jamming the highways into the coastal towns of the Monterey peninsula, it is possible to find spots that recall the quiet of de Forest’s paintings.
Quiet and de Forest were companions for many years. Both he and his wife began losing their hearing earlier in life and were profoundly deaf toward the end. It is speculated that they moved to California to escape the exhaustion of trying to hear in the active gallery and social sphere of New York. Audiologists know that people with increasing hearing loss begin to isolate themselves. De Forest didn’t have the advantage of what I refer to as two trips to Europe’s worth of 21st century electronic technology that I have in own my ears. Even with that, solitude and, ironically, quiet places, are a welcome respite from trying to hear and to understand.
De Forest and others with auditory or visual handicaps develop their other senses sometimes in unexpected ways. He no longer sought the “luxurioustest” elegance of the Gilded Age. Although it’s a pleasure to see the quick, thin brush strokes of his paintings and to admire his use of color and composition, the paintings point beyond themselves to the mist, tenacious trees and the perpetual battle of the sea against the land. De Forest felt nature in his quiet. He wrote, “My idea in painting is to make everyone who looks at my pictures think of real nature and not of me or the way the painting is done. This is art as I conceive it.” —
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