Annie Harmon

Annie Harmon
Annie Harmon in her studio ca. 1887[1]
Born	Annie Lyle Harmon February 1855 (1855-02) San Francisco, California, U.S.
Died	August 27, 1930(1930-08-27) (aged 75) San Francisco, California, U.S.
Years active	1885-1925

Annie Lyle Harmon (February 1855- August 27, 1930) was a Californian plein-air artist known especially for her paintings of trees. A student of leading landscape artist William Keith (1838–1911), Harmon, along with several other women artists, was a fixture in Keith’s studio for many years.

Early life

Oak, Menlo Park, ca. 1900-1914, oil on canvas, 12 x 18 inches. Private collection.

Mendocino Ranch Rock Pile, ca. 1911, oil on canvas, 11 1/2 x 17 1/4 inches. Hearst Art Gallery Collection, Saint Mary's College, Moraga, California.

Grass Hut at La Zacualpa, ca. 1905, oil on canvas, 12 x 8 inches. Private collection.

Annie Harmon was the daughter of Samuel H. Harmon, a lumber merchant who had come to San Francisco from Maine via Cape Horn in 1849, and his wife Mary Palmer Harmon. She grew up in prosperous circumstances that allowed her access to the city’s small cultural society. Her brother Edward married William Keith’s only daughter.^[2]

Education

Harmon studied with Raymond Dabb Yelland (1848–1900), an English-born landscape artist who taught students in Oakland.^[2]

Career

She began working in William Keith’s studio in the early 1880s; the works she exhibited in her first show in 1885 centered on images of the California hills in emulation of her teacher’s style. Throughout her life, she sketched from nature, but finished her paintings back in the studio.^[2]

She exhibited frequently from the 1880s until her death, especially with the San Francisco Art Association. In the city directories, she always identified herself as “artist.” She participated in the exhibits at the Woman’s Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.^[2]

In the early 1900s, she traveled to La Zacualpa, Mexico, where her family was involved in a rubber plantation; some of her most successful landscapes were made there. A few paintings in the collection of her most ardent collector indicate that at some time she traveled to Australia, although this trip cannot be substantiated.^[2]

She lost nearly 400 of her works when her studio in the San Francisco Press Building was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. While she remained an independent artist throughout her life and continued to exhibit after the fire, she never recovered financially, and was increasingly dependent on friends for support in her later years.^[2]

The primary subject of her works was always Californian trees, either redwoods or, most successfully, the oak trees of the Berkeley and San Francisco hills. She developed two contrasting painterly styles, depending on her portrayal of light: either a thick impasto, used for her portrayal of redwoods and eucalyptus; or more atmospheric effects to depict the foggy California hillsides and the coastal ranges. The majority of her known works are in two private collections, although some of her paintings are now in the collection of The Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary’s College, Moraga, California—home of a substantial number of the paintings of William Keith.^[3]

Posthumous exhibitions

In 2010 an exhibition of Harmon's work and that of two other turn-of-the-century artists, Marion Kavanagh Wachtel and Mary DeNeale Morgan was held at the Saint Mary's College Museum of Art. There were nearly 100 landscape paintings of California in the show made by the en plein air artists.^[4]

References

Further reading

• Hearst Art Gallery (July 2010). Superbly Independent: Early California Paintings by Annie Harmon, Mary DeNeale Morgan and Marion Kavanagh Wachtel. Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary's College. ISBN 978-1-886091-28-3.