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Ad Code: 3
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An example of work by Ethel Marian Wickes
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following, submitted March 2005, is researched and written by Douglas S. McElwain, Researcher of American artists, especially early California impressionists.
Ethel May Wickes (a.k.a. Ethel Marian Wickes) was born February 13, 1872 on Long Island in Hempstead, New York. She was the daughter of Luther Carter Wickes and Margaret Elizabeth (Hunt) Wickes. Her maternal grandfather (Hunt) hailed from the Town of Columbia, Herkimer County, New York in the foothills of the Adirondacks. Her maternal grandmother (Clapsaddle) came from the family farm in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. Interestingly the ancestral farm was originally a grant from King George to Colonel Daniel Clapsaddle. Wickes' mother was born in Utica, New York in 1841. She was the oldest of three children and the daughter of a physician. She moved to Nevada City, California, a gold mining town, when she was eighteen and there married Luther Wickes.
Wickes' father was born in New York State around 1834, the youngest of five children and the son of a physician. The exact date Wickes' father moved to California isn't known, but it was between the 1850 census where he is listed as living in Rensselaerville, New York and when his first daughter, Kate Harvey Wickes, was born in California in 1863. Early in his life he had tried farming, but his later occupation was that of a salesman. He sold paint in 1870, pharmaceuticals in 1880 and insurance between 1886 and 1890.
Sometime between the census of 1870 and Ethel Wickes' birth in 1872 the family, including her older brother Francis who had been born in California around 1865, returned to New York. Given the difficulty of getting to California in the 1850s (the transcontinental railroad wasn't completed until 1869) and that Wickes' mother had moved to a gold mining town, it seems reasonable that Wickes' parents had come to California seeking to find their fortune, stayed until the Civil War was over and then returned to New York when there was an easier way to travel across the country.
Wickes' younger sister Florence Louise Wickes was born in New York State in 1876. Wickes had one other sibling but nothing is known about the child other than the child was not listed on any of the census forms, and both the unnamed child and Francis had passed away before 1900. In 1880 the Wickes family, including Francis who by then was a store clerk, was living in Queens, New York and employing two housekeepers.
It's not known why Ethel, her mother, father and two sisters moved back to Northern California in 1886, but it's possible that her brother Francis died about this time (the last record of him being alive is the census of 1880) and the family wanted to start over somewhere else where they had fonder memories. In any case, Ethel ended up in San Francisco. The Wickes' family had a tradition of valuing education that went back several generations and, as a result, she and her siblings received schooling when they were young. In fact, at the time of her death, Wickes had almost three hundred books in her personal library.
Wickes began pursuing a career in art when she was seventeen. At that time she was "determined to become the American Rosa Bonheur. Weekly she traveled in a horse drawn gig to the Guadalupe Ranch in San Mateo County, where she sketched her animal subjects. She went to live on a ranch in Kenwood, Sonoma where she began painting geese.
In early 1897 Wickes began to gain some notoriety for her work: "For several years Miss Ethel Wickes has worked at the easel, producing some really exquisite work, chiefly remarkable for its detail and its unusually happy handling of still life. Miss Wickes has shown good judgment in steering clear of over production. She has labored slowly, carefully and well. In everything she does, she seems to infuse a bit of her own feeling. Each canvas, no matter how small, appeals in its own individual way to the observer. They are for the most part, small; dainty in size and treatment, they are already so good that one cannot hope but Miss Wickes will yet do something great, as well as clever. In pastoral scenes, Miss Wickes' work is quite strong. Particularly natural and fetching are the studies of tiny chicks. . there is life and motion in Miss Wickes' canvases, and if her individuality develops abroad, we shall yet hear of her in a Paris salon."
Later, in 1897, Wickes traveled abroad and studied oil and watercolor portrait painting in Paris at the Academie Colarossi with Gustave Claude Courtois (1853-1923), Louis Auguste Girardot, (1856-1933), and Rene Francois Xavier Prinet (1861-1946) and briefly at the Academie Julian with William Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) and Gabriel Ferrier (1847-1914). She also studied under Laureano Barrau (1863-1957) and Hawley (though it is not known which Hawley it was). In addition, as part of her overseas sojourn, Wickes made a long sketching trip through England, Holland and Ireland.
Wickes returned to the United States around 1900 at which time she briefly painted at her studio in New York. As would be expected, the subjects of Wickes paintings during this period were European scenes as the titles of her work attest (e.g., "Landscape and Cattle, Ireland" and "Nine Miles from Cork").
Wickes' father passed away in 1900 and this is likely the reason she returned to the United States at that time. After her short stay in New York, Wickes moved back to San Francisco and the family home where she sought out California subject matter to paint. With the exception of two brief periods, Wickes remained a resident of San Francisco for the rest of her life. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, she lived in Pacific Grove from 1907 to 1909. Then during 1911 Wickes traveled to Seattle to place one of her murals in the Florence Henry Memorial Chapel where it remains today.
The mural, a four by twelve foot painting depicting Christ's entry into Jerusalem, was commissioned in memory of the child Florence Henry. Wickes painted other works with religious themes and was known for her "Stations of the Cross" oil paintings. These were started in the early 1920s, and several were still unfinished at the time of her death. It's possible that Wickes turned to religious themes for her paintings after her father passed away in 1900 or after the death and destruction from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. This, in turn, might have lead to her commission for the Florence Henry memorial mural. While in Seattle she stayed in the Chelsea Hotel and from its' rooftop garden painted "The Olympics from Queen Ann Hill." She also exhibited her paintings of California (including those of Carmel Pines), Holland and Ireland at the Washington Art Association in Seattle, Washington.
Although Wickes painted various subjects in oil and pastel she is best known for her watercolors of California wildflowers and of geese. She was a prolific artist who began her career painting figures, local landscapes, still life, and wildflowers. She began painting wildflowers because her invalid mother liked them and Wickes, as a child, had heard her mother tell stories about the profusion of wildflowers in the Mohawk Valley and in California.
In a politely written letter penned late in her life Wickes stated that she had completed one-hundred fifty paintings of wildflowers by the time she was nineteen in 1901. However a San Francisco Chronicle article said she had destroyed all of her previous wildflower paintings when she returned from Europe and began her current collection around 1914. Another newspaper article indicated that by 1913 she had painted over one-hundred and fifty of the state's wildflowers. Although it's not exactly clear when Wickes began utilizing watercolors to chronicle all of the state's plants in an aesthetically pleasing as well as a botanically accurate manner, evidence suggests it was around 1913. It is worth noting that the botanical accuracy of her paintings included not only the flowers themselves but also their natural habitat and their manner of growth.
In 1917, she won a special Medal of Honor at the California State Fair in Sacramento for her one hundred thirty-two watercolors depicting California wildflowers. In the 1920s her collection was sought after by museums and colleges on the east and west coasts including by friends of the Yale University Museum. She kept these paintings, or at least copies of them throughout her life exhibiting them periodically and keeping them on the wall of her School of Painting. In 1931, various San Francisco civic organizations suggested that Wickes send her wildflower painting collection to the 1933 Chicago World's fair to represent San Francisco, although it's not known if they were exhibited there.
Wickes tried to sell her collection in its entirety during the 1930s to the California Academy of Sciences and other institutions both to raise money and to keep the collection intact for posterity. However, no one she approached seemed to have the funds to purchase the entire collection during this difficult economic period. Wickes ended up bequeathing the collection to her longtime friend Dr. Clarence E. Wells. The paintings seem to have been acquired by Edwards Huntington Metcalf who has, on at least one occasion, loaned them to the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. A book illustrating the paintings was published sometime during the 20th century but whether this was before or after her death is unknown. Lilian D. Wells, a friend and fellow artist, donated her collection of Wickes' paintings and papers to the Huntington Library in 1979.
A number of professors and botanists commented very favorably on the quality and accuracy of Wickes' wildflower paintings. "Harvard professors and artists were alike in their praise, comparing them (her wildflower painting collection) to the wild flower painting collection of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew considered the finest in the world." Norman Taylor, Curator of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and known for writing Taylor's Encyclopedia of Gardening, lectured on her work at the International Garden Club in Newport, RI in 1920. He felt that her collection of one hundred twenty works contained the best paintings of wildflowers he had ever seen and valued the collection at twelve thousand dollars, a large sum of money at the time.
Dr. Willis Linn Jepson, Professor of Botany at the University of California who founded the California Botanical Society, helped to establish the Sierra Club, and to start the Save the Redwoods League, and authored eight books on botany, lectured on her work and appreciated her paintings as beautiful and accurate and her collection as having historical value, memorializing the species that were disappearing due to development in the state. In 1939 Dr. J. V. Harvey, head of the Botany department at the San Bernardino Valley Junior College, also praised her paintings.
Wickes was a peer of the San Diego painter A. R. Valentien (1862-1925). They both were painting California wildflowers, in watercolor over the same time period and with the same meticulous attention to detail. However there is no indication that they ever met or were even aware of each others' efforts. While Wickes did not achieve her objective of painting all of the state's wildflowers, through her own painting trips and with the help of friends bringing her specimens, she did paint a large number of them.
Early in her career Wickes began to paint geese and became known as the "Goose-Girl" or the "Geese Girl" for a painting of a girl tending her geese that was sold in New York. By 1925, she had sold several hundred of her geese paintings. She was also known to paint landscapes in oils.
Wickes understood early on that to be a successful artist she needed to do more than just paint well. She realized that she needed to set her work apart from that of other artists and view her profession or "hobby," as she called it in a business-like fashion. It's clear that Wickes was comfortable promoting her work. She named her paintings in inviting ways (e.g. "Nine Miles from Cork" and "The Olympics from Queen Ann Hill"), gave numerous public exhibitions (including two on the east coast) of her work and participated in organizations that promoted the subject of many of her paintings (e.g. the California Spring Blossom and Wild Flower Association) thereby giving her broader exposure to those who were like minded and who could afford to buy paintings.
It's also possible that Wickes used "Marian" as her middle name during her career to sound more professional. Wickes realized that "it takes an artist time to find out what subject meets popular approval" and ultimately paint what collectors will buy. Wickes doesn't appear to have sought out newspaper coverage but she didn't shirk from reporters either. She would sell her paintings through galleries or accept commissions for works, sometimes shipping the requested piece to as far away as the east coast. She sold one of her California wildflower watercolors for two thousand dollars, again an impressive sum at the time.
Wickes, her mother, and two sisters were fortunate to have survived the 1906 earthquake. When Wickes returned to San Francisco after the Great Quake she lived at 519 Webster Street, which became the new family home and her studio. The old family home at 820 Grove Street was presumably destroyed in the earthquake or the fire in the aftermath. Between 1912 and 1918, Wickes and her two sisters, who were also artists (Kate is listed under "Crayon Artists" in the 1900 city directory (which was probably a reference to her work in pastel), ran the Wickes Studio out of the Webster Street address. Her sister Florence would later leave the art profession and become a librarian.
The last San Francisco city directory listing for Wickes' mother is in 1914 and for her sister Kate is in 1923. It's reasonable to assume that her mother and Kate passed away around 1914 and 1923, respectively. In September 1928, Wickes and her sister (probably Florence) opened the Ethel M. Wickes School of Painting at 222 Kearny Street in San Francisco. The school taught classes in drawing, watercolor painting and oil painting. In January 1929, Minerva Dorinda Lockwood a.k.a. Mrs. Minerva Pierce (1883-1972), a western artist, became the Assistant Director and an instructor at the school.
By 1933, Wickes had moved her studio and her "greenhouse" of wildflower specimens to 555 Sutter Street where she lived for the rest of her life. Florence remained in the Webster Street family home. It seems that by 1933, with her mother and Kate gone, she and Florence had grown apart. Wickes bequeathed Florence some family memorabilia (a painting of their grandfather Hunt and some larger silver pieces) but none of her paintings.
In addition to traveling to her out of state exhibitions, Wickes greatly enjoyed her yearly (between 1914 and 1939) spring and summer painting trips to various locations around the state including the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Wickes was an athletic woman able to roam through the high Sierras in search of rare wildflowers to paint. She would make a point of keeping a diary of sorts listing distances, major landmarks, and wildflowers seen. During these painting trips, Wickes collected eight specimens of wildflower that are preserved in the University of California, Berkeley, Jepson Herbarium.
The 1930s was a very difficult time for Wickes, as it was for most artists. The Great Depression and changing tastes in art caused her income from painting to drop significantly. However, Wickes was more fortunate than most in that she had a modest stipend of one hundred dollars per month coming in from a trust her cousins in New York had set up. Even so, she struggled to make ends meet and by the time she passed away, she was penniless. As most people did in the depression, she scrambled to make an income. She sold an occasional painting, taught a student here and there, charged a modest admission for people to see her paintings in her studio (originally asking fifty cents but then lowering the admission price to twenty five cents), and in 1937 she sent four of her watercolors to a publisher in Monterey fetching forty two dollars in royalties in 1939.
During the 1930s, Wickes stopped exhibiting her paintings at private art galleries. Wickes felt that, at the Worden Gallery at least, "They gossiped and carried tales. Something to do with the Catholic and church element interested in the stations, I believe, but I did not know the facts. I know Miss W. distrusted them." Her move away from exhibiting at private galleries might also have been due to the lower prices galleries were willing to pay artists for their work during this time.
Making the situation more difficult was that, by the 1930s, Wickes had no interest in changing her painting style to accommodate the changing market demand. Her view of the new art styles in the 1930s can be summarized by a statement she made to a newspaper at the time of her M. H. de Young Museum exhibit: "Futurists and ultra modernists would be confined to sanitariums if there were not so many of them."
Wickes combined her art with her love for the land by actively participating in conservation organizations. The San Francisco Chronicle credited Wickes for being "largely responsible for the early-day wild flower consciousness here, which has now developed into a State-wide hobby of cultivating wild flowers." Wickes was a member of the California Club, a women's club founded by Lovell White in 1897 in the wake of an abortive suffrage campaign. The California Club, which supported forest preservation, merged into the California State Federation of Women's Clubs in 1900. Prior to 1933, Wickes was Chairman of the art section of the California State Federation of Women's Clubs.
Wickes was also involved with the California Spring Blossom and Wild Flower Association from its inception in 1923. From September 1936 to May 1938, Wickes was the association's President and in 1938 was additionally the Director of the Flower Show. During its early life the association is best known for planting flowers, bushes and trees on Alcatraz and designing Golden Gate Park's Garden of Shakespeare's Flowers. Wickes remained a member of the association for the rest of her life. Wickes was supportive of the California Academy of Sciences, lending the academy her collection of California watercolors for a prolonged exhibit (1936-1939) which benefited them both.
Wickes passed away on February 27, 1940 after being ill for about a year and a half. She was cremated and interred at the Mountain View Columbarium, Oakland. She was survived by her sister Florence who, herself, appears to have passed away a few years later in late 1943 or early 1944. Wickes' appointed her good friends Dr. Clarence E. Wells and Martin Enders Van Buren as the executors of her estate. Wickes bequeathed Van Buren all of her papers which he loaded into two steamer trunks to go through later. It's not known what became of these papers.
Wickes held her first exhibition at the William Morris Gallery, New York (1890) when she was eighteen. Her other solo shows include the Garden Club, Newport, Rhode Island (1919, 1920); Boston, Massachusetts (1920); Spring Blossom and Wild Flower Show and Pageant Tea, San Francisco (1923); Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco (1925); Rabjohn and Morcom Galleries, San Francisco (1925); Thomas Welton Art Gallery, Stanford University, Palo Alto (1925); Willard Worden Galleries, San Francisco (1926, 1927, 1929); Nevada State University, Reno, Nevada (c. 1929); Tamalpias Centere Woman's Club, San Rafael (1929); Everhardt Museum, Scranton, Pennsylvania (1929, 1930); University of California, Berkeley (1933); M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco (1933, 1940); Flower Show of the Hollywood Knolls Flower Club, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood (1935, 1938, 1939); Three Rivers Club, Woodland (1939); Chico State College, Chico (1939); Beverly Hills High School, Beverly Hills (1939); Bel Air Garden Club, The Sycamores, Bel Air (1939); and San Bernardino Valley Junior College, San Bernardino (1939).
Her works have been shown in group exhibitions at the Fresno Arts Center Gallery, San Francisco; Mechanics Institute Fair, San Francisco (1890); San Francisco Art Association, San Francisco (1898, 1900, 1901, 1916); Kennedy-Rabjohn Art Company, San Francisco (1900); William Morris Art Dealer, San Francisco (1900); California State Fair (California State Agricultural Society), Sacramento (1900, 1902, 1917); Washington Art Association, Seattle, Washington (1911, 1913); Rabjohn Galleries, San Francisco (1917); Western Arts Association, San Francisco (1922); California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco (1936-1939); Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco (1939) where she was awarded a Certificate of Merit for her exhibit; and the Huntington Library, San Marino (1978, 1979).
Copies of three Wickes paintings are contained in the California State Library files, Sacramento. Slides of three of her paintings are contained in the Nan and Roy Farrington Jones Archive of Early California & Western Art at the California State Museum Resource Center, West Sacramento. Four of her works are listed in the Inventory of American Paintings, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.
Wickes' paintings are held by the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; the Florence Henry Memorial Chapel, Seattle, Washington; the Huntington Library, San Marino; and the Shasta State Historical Monument, Shasta.
Wickes' paintings are not seen in many commercial art venues today. Only four auction records for her paintings since 1994 could be found. This rarity may be due to the medium she used for much of her work. Both watercolor and pastels are delicate mediums that require protection for the paintings to survive long spans of time.
Ethel Wickes was in many ways a proper and traditional woman of her time but in other respects she was a pioneer. She was polite and tactful as well as astute, determined and independent. She was educated, traveled and savy in business, making a good living from her art until the Great Depression. While Wickes never married, she was close to her family. She loved nature and championed the early California environmental movement by actively participating in woman's organizations that supported the preservation of the state's natural environment. Lastly, Wickes was an observant, meticulous and talented artist who took great joy in the geese and wildflowers she painted.
Sources include:
California Census Records, Death Certificates, Maxwell Galleries, California Academy of Sciences Library, Crocker-Langley's San Francisco Directory, Who Was Who in American Art, Edan Hughes, Artists in California, Kerwin Galleries, Joseph A Baird Collection. AskART.com database, San Francisco Chronicle, Smithsonian Institution, Huntington Library,
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Hempstead, Long Island, New York on Feb. 13, 1872, Wickes moved with her family to northern California in 1886. She began painting while in her early teens and studied art in Paris at Académies Julian and Colarossi. While in Europe she sketched in Holland, England, and Ireland. She then returned to San Francisco where she remained except during 1907-09, when she lived in Pacific Grove and during 1911 when she was in Seattle to place murals in the Florence Henry Memorial Chapel.
At the time of her death in San Francisco on Feb. 27, 1940 she headed the art section of the California State Federation of Women's Clubs. Working in watercolor and oil, she was a prolific painter of geese and California wild flowers.
Exhibitions: Morris Gallery (NYC), 1890; SFAA, 1898-1901; Washington AA, 1911; Calif. State Fair, 1900-02, 1917 (medal); Newport (RI) Garden Club, RI), 1919 (solo); Fairmont Hotel (SF), 1925; Stanford University, 1925 (solo); Worden Gallery (SF), 1926, 1929 (solos); Everhardt Museum (Scranton, PA), 1929 (solo); De Young Museum, 1933, 1940 (solos); Roosevelt Hotel (Hollywoood), 1935; Chico State College, 1939; Golden Gate International Exhibition, 1939.
In: Shasta State Historical Monument; Huntington Library (San Marino). | Source:
Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"
Argus Magazine, June 1927; Women Artists of the American West; California State Library (Sacramento); SF Chronicle, 2-29-1940 (obituary). | | Nearly 20,000 biographies can be found in Artists in California 1786-1940 by Edan Hughes and is available for sale ($150). For a full book description and order information please click here. |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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