Frances Gearhart
| Frances Gearhart | |
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Frances Gearhart, 1900
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| Born |
Frances Hammell Gearhart January 4, 1869 Sagetown, Illinois, United States |
| Died | April 4, 1958 (aged 89) Pasadena, California, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | State Normal School at Los Angeles (1891) |
| Known for | Printmaking Watercolor |
| Website | www |
Frances Gearhart (January 4, 1869 – April 4, 1959) was an American printmaker and watercolorist known for her boldly drawn and colored woodcut and linocut prints of American landscapes. Focused especially on California's coasts and mountains, this body of work has been called "a vibrant celebration of the western landscape." She is one of the most important American color block print artists of the early 20th century.
Frances Hammell Gearhart was born January 4, 1869, in Sagetown, Illinois. She moved to California in 1888 and began studying at the State Normal School at Los Angeles (now UCLA) the following year. She graduated in 1891 and thereafter supported herself for several years teaching English at the high school level. At some point, she received further training in art from Charles Herbert Woodbury and Henry Rankin Poore. She may also have taken a class from Frank Morley Fletcher, who was instrumental in bringing Japanese woodblock techniques to Europe and America.
In one of her earliest public displays in Los Angeles, which was a joint exhibit in 1909 with other high school teachers, Frances contributed a collection of "striking water color scenes". At her first one-person exhibition in March 1911 at the Walker Theatre Gallery the Los Angeles Times art critic Antony Anderson described her 35 watercolor landscapes as being "full of movement". Even at this early stage, critics noted her as a colorist who promised to develop into "one of the strongest of California's landscape painters." She continued exhibiting watercolors for several years before moving into printmaking—especially linocuts and woodcuts—which would become her preferred medium.
Gearhart was taught block printing by her sisters May and Edna, also artists, who had learned it from Arthur Wesley Dow at the Ipswich Summer School of Art in Massachusetts. She worked in a traditional Japanese relief-printing method, creating a separate block for each color in the final print, with individual prints requiring up to 8 separate blocks. It is estimated that she created some 250 different prints altogether in editions of 20–50, each of which was printed by hand.
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