Note

Born in Fayette, Missouri in 1857, Calthea Vivian began her career as a printmaker before eventually transitioning to oil painting. Settling in Sacramento in 1870, she took classes at the Crocker Art Gallery (now the Crocker Art Museum) and studied at San Francisco's Hopkins Institute of Art under Arthur Matthews, one of the foremost Northern California Tonalists. The best of Vivian's works reveal overlapping influences: the simplified forms of her teacher, the decorative patterning of the Arts & Crafts Movement, and the earthy palette of Bay Area Impressionism.

The present work, a three-panel folding screen, is the result of one of Vivian’s many outings along California's Central Coast. Artists had long been attracted to the region; its gracious landscapes and sinuous coastline offered ample opportunity for sketching and painting en plein air. Here, the spindly cypresses of Pacific Grove's Lover's Point take center stage. A narrow footpath meanders past stone walls and into the composition's foreground. The Pacific Ocean, characteristically even-tempered, occupies the middle third of the painting while, overhead, a cloud-filled sky dissolves into a golden haze.

Rather than independent, unrelated works, Vivian constructs a single uninterrupted narrative—a celebration of the Monterey Peninsula's resplendent beauty–confined only by the architecture of the screen. Cypresses, Pacific Grove represents a fine example by a rare-to-market woman artist from the history of early California paining.