Hanson Puthuff

Near La Cañada, c. 1930

c. 1930

Hanson Puthuff was born in 1875 in Waverly, Missouri. He is primarily remembered for his California landscapes and desert paintings, and his involvement in the Southern California art world in the early 20th century. His paintings of rolling hills, canyons, and atmospheric effects of Southern California, the Sierras, and desert scenes are widely admired. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1903, as an established pictorial artist. He worked for the next 23 years as a commercial artist, primarily painting billboards as well as a theater scene painter. His great love, however, was "plein aire" landscape painting, which he took up full time in 1926. Easel painting grew quite naturally out of his professional commercial work. When painting billboards, Puthuff would be transported by horse-drawn wagon out to a billboard and deposited for the day. When he and his helpers finished sign painting, they would often set up easels and sketch and paint while they waited for the return of the wagon. When Puthuff first came to California he had been mainly interested in figural painting, but he found this new land so paintable that he concentrated almost exclusively on landscapes from that time on. Shortly after leaving commercial art, the Santa Fe Railroad offered Puthuff one of his first commissions. He was asked to paint a series of different views of the Grand Canyon, which the railroad would use for advertising and promotional purposes. These works, Grand Canyon, were shown to the public in a 1927 exhibition in the offices of the railroad. Puthuff also painted backgrounds for the Santa Fe Railroad model train exhibits in various cities. Living in La Canada and Corona del Mar, Puthuff painted desert scenes throughout California and frequently accompanied Edgar Payne on painting trips to Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. He loved the bright colors and open space of Navajo country. The most common landscapes were those of the coast south of Los Angeles, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, and among the desert buttes of the Southwest. His work is often considered to be stylistically akin to that of William Wendt, although with a wider chromatic spectrum. Puthuff is also particularly identified with the depiction of eucalyptus trees, as are Jean Mannheim, Dana Bartlett, Edgar Payne, and Anna Althea Hills, and Paul Lauritz. In addition to his own artistic achievements, Puthuff was an activist in the art community. He was partly responsible for the formation of the two most important artists' organizations of the period, the California Art Club and the Art Students League of Los Angeles, which he helped found with Norwegian- born art writer and close friend Antony Anderson, art critic for the Los Angeles Times. He became associated with a group called the Garvanza Circle, named for the Garvanza district of eastern Los Angeles, which included such artists as Fernand Lungren, Carl Oscar Borg, Maynard Dixon, Granville Redmond, Elmer Wachtel, and others who were inspired by southwestern cultural heritage.