Edwin deakin biography
(above: Edwin Deakin, Christmas Morning, Hôtel de Cluny, n.d. Oil on canvas, 42 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches. Crocker Art Museum, long-term loan from the California Department of Finance, conserved with funds provided by Gerald D. Gordon.)
(above: Edwin Deakin, San Gabriel Mission, n.d. Oil on canvas, 22 3/4 x 35 1/2 inches. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Gerald D. Gordon.)
(above: Edwin Deakin, Palace of Fine Arts and the Lagoon, ca. 1915. Oil on canvas, 32 3/8 x 48 3/8 inches. Crocker Art Museum, long-term loan from the California Department of Finance, conserved with funds provided by Gerald D. Gordon.)
Table of Contents
“For the California of Today”: Visual History and the Picturesque Landscape in Edwin Deakin’s Missions of California Series
Samantha Burton is a lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California, where she was also a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow. She holds a PhD in art history from McGill University. Her research focuses on transnational mobility and cultural exchange in the nineteenth-century British World. Her current book project examines how white Canadian women artists who lived and worked in Britain managed multiple and often competing ideas about empire, race, and national identity in the decades prior to World War I. Research relating to this project has been published in venues that include Victorian Studies, the Journal of Canadian Art History, and the edited collection Women, Femininity, and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789–1914 (Ashgate, 2014). Her biography of the Canadian impressionist Helen McNicoll, Helen McNicoll: Life and Work, was published by the Art Canada Institute in 2017.
Email the author: burtons[at]usc.edu
by Samantha Burton
Fig. 1, Edwin Deakin, Mission Santa Barbara, ca. 1897–99. Oil on canvas. Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library, Santa Barbara. Artwork in the public domain; published in Scott Shields, Edwin Deakin: California Painter of the Picturesque (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate, 2008), 84.
Introduction British-American painter (1838–1923) Edwin Deakin (May 21, 1838 – May 11, 1923) was a British-American artist best known for his romantic landscapes as well as his architectural studies, especially the Spanish colonial missions of California. His still lifes are considered to be some of the finest of the genre. Deakin is one of the artists who popularized scenes of San Francisco's Chinatown. His sensitive and highly publicized depictions of the deteriorating missions drew public attention to the necessity of restoring these historically important monuments. Deakin was born in Sheffield, England, on May 21, 1838. He was apprenticed at the age of 12 to a business which painted landscapes and floral designs on furniture in the "Japanese style," but he received no formal training. By 18, he was a notable landscape artist. He emigrated to the US in 1856 with his family to the city of Chicago, where his father opened a hardware store and Edwin's occupation was listed in the Census as a "case maker." On June 21, 1865 Edwin Deakin married the 21-year-old Isabel Fox, also an emigrant from England. The following year saw the birth of their son Oscar Edwin Deakin, who became a talented painter, but died at the age of 30. The Deakins also had a daughter, Edna, who became an architect. Just prior to 1870 Edwin, along with his entire extended family, moved to San Francisco, California. He quickly established a successful career as a painter of the untamed California wilderness. Although he consigned his paintings to private commercial galleries and was a director and frequent exhibitor at the San Francisco Art Association (SFAA), he sold most of his canvases through public auctions. He became an exhibiting member of the Graphic Club and Bohemian Club. In 1874 he exhibited a Lake Tahoe sce Home / Museum / Search ARC Museum Edwin Deakin 24 artworks American painter Born 5/21/1838 - Died 5/11/1923 Born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England Died in Berkeley, California, United States {"Id":8115,"Name":"Edwin Deakin","Biography":null,"Awards":null,"HasAlbums":false,"HasPortraits":false,"HasRelationships":false,"HasArticles":false,"HasDepictedPlaces":true,"HasLetters":false,"HasLibraryItems":false,"HasProducts":false,"HasSignatures":false,"HasVideos":false,"HasMapLocations":true,"TotalArtworks":24}
In 2014, the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library launched a fundraising campaign to conserve a series of paintings of the California missions by the prolific British-US artist Edwin Deakin (1838–1923). The paintings, one for each of the twenty-one Franciscan missions established by Spanish authorities in Alta California from 1769 to 1823, were privately donated to Mission Santa Barbara (fig. 1) in the 1950s. Like the buildings they represent, the works had fallen into disrepair in the years since their creation. P Edwin Deakin
Life
San Francisco
Edwin Deakin