Another fabulous piece in MMG’s art collection, signed Grace Howell in the 1930’s, caught my eye. In the first two quarters of the twentieth century, a career female artist member of the predominately male California Plein Air School was rare. Especially a female who maintained a studio and sold work for a living. So I endeavored to find out if Grace Howell was a career artist, or the wife of a wealthy man who supported the expensive, time-consuming practice of painting in oil. She clearly relished signing her name so that nobody missed her gender.
Work by Grace Howell, born in 1877, sells today at auction
In this case, we see delicate eucalyptus trees to the foreground, a field of grass and live oak to the mid ground, and distinctive mountains of California to the background. I also look to the quality of the sky in Plein Air. The sky should appear both translucent and misty, hard to achieve in a semi-realistic way. Grace Howell captured the California sky well.
Howell, born in Denver, became known as a San Diego painter, journeying to nearby deserts and coasts. While researching a painter I look up the family genealogy to find any clues to an artist’s daily practice of art. With a female painter of the early 20th century I look for a husband, and if her family considered her a painter, oftentimes not mentioned in the genealogy. Genealogies usually include the MAN’S business, but not often the WOMAN’S.
Meet her husband
The esteemed Edgar A Howell was born in 1874 on a farm in Colorado. By the time Edgar and Grace emigrated from Colorado to San Diego, she at 51, him at 53, he ran a tight ship as a businessman and civic leader in Denver. His genealogical details refer to him as an active Mason, a Rotarian, a leader in the Civic Association, his church, and politically active in Colorado. Here we see a man nobody considered a Bohemian.
He established a thriving business, the first of its kind, as a rater of businessmen’s retail credit. Because I know men in finance I don’t think of him welcoming a renegade painter wife. Indeed, we see Grace Howell’s work as pretty and palatable.
How did the couple come to be Californians?
Edgar came from a farming family who settled parts of Colorado. Up till he opened his credit business he worked the over 80 acres family farm in fruit and livestock. Grace and Edgar married when he was 24, and his business took off. They moved, after almost 30 years in Colorado, to La Mesa, then a fruit farming area outside San Diego in 1927. In their fifties we might guess they moved to retire. At this point Grace, a self-taught painter, began to paint her environs, so we known her as a California painter. Edan Hughes, the definitive author of the bible of all early California painting, Artists in California 1786-1940, said Grace Howell painted at her leisure.
We put facts together, looking for the commitment level of a painter. Married to a wealthy businessperson, retired to La Mesa, Grace painted at her leisurely. That’s quite a different painter than Marie Dolph, who HAD to make a living painting, as that was what she was good at, and her husband was not much of a farmer. And her family suffered in the Great Depression. Marie Dolph was a fantastic art education, at the Art Institute of Chicago, while Grace Howell was self-taught.
Grace was a gentlewoman painter, and not a bad one at that. Someday some art historian will write about the lady-painters of leisure of the first two quarters of the 20th century, and perhaps we will see Grace Howell in that book. The value of this painting at auction, no more than $500.