Elizabeth Eaton Burton - artist

Magazine Antiques, April, 2002 by Victoria Rodriguez Thiessen

Stickley, Roycroft, Grueby. These are the names typically associated with the arts and crafts movement. Few women are remembered and recognized for their contributions. Yet Elizabeth Eaton Burton (Fig. 1) typified the arts and crafts movement of southern California, using simple and local materials, emphasizing hand-craftsmanship, and expounding on local traditions. Gustav Stickley (1858-1942), as well as other artists and critics, admired her leather- and metalwork in the early 1900s. A talented and career-oriented woman, Burton did not limit herself to decorative arts, but explored a variety of artistic fields, including painting and photography, as well as theater criticism; and her efforts tended to be rewarded with praise and publicity.

Elizabeth Eaton's parents, the artist Charles Frederick Eaton and his wife Helen Justice Mitchell, resided in Paris when Elizabeth was born in 1869. While growing up in Europe, she studied in Paris, England, and Dresden, but received no formal training in the arts, except some classes in drawing. Mrs. Eaton suffered from a "bronchial affection," (1) and the family was forced to move in search of a healthier climate. For some years, the Eatons lived in the south of France, but in 1886 they left Europe and settled in Santa Barbara, California. At seventeen years old, Elizabeth looked forward to the move and later wrote warmly of Santa Barbara in her scrapbook:

Here was a landscape unsurpassed for its beauty of mountains and sea, with the most wonderful climate in the world and a luxurious vegetation, still unspoiled by human bands; virgin soil where one could create lovely pictures with nature's help and yet within the limit of one's country. Tlx dye [sic] was cast; this is where we were to come, where I was destined to spend the best years of my life. (2)

Charles Eaton purchased thirty acres of land, and by 1890 the family had moved into a newly built estate called Riso Rivo, where Eaton had a studio above the carriage house. He established himself in California as an arts and crafts designer and produced handmade books, objects in tooled leather, and metal-wares, such as lamps and tea screens, often incorporating shells (see Pls. III, IV). As an arts and crafts proponent, he used inexpensive and local materials and worked them by hand, creating intricate designs characteristic of California regionalism.

Elizabeth Eaton had a very close relationship with her father, and, in her recollections of her first twenty years in Santa Barbara, she stated that "since earliest childhood, my father and I had been great pals. I had inherited his inclination towards the artistic side of life, and so whatever interested him interested me." (3) Although he had studied to be a painter, Charles Eaton had given up his brushes for health reasons, and after their move to the Cote d'Azur, he started collecting antiques. He opened a small workshop there, where he worked alongside two Italian cabinetmakers and wood carvers. Elizabeth Eaton spent many hours watching and learning, and she continued to be interested in her father's trade after they moved to Santa Barbara. Her filial affection and reverence toward her father are evident in her constant reference to him as her "artist father," and her professional admiration of his works is clear from her own oeuvre. Like her father she handcrafted leather, inexpensive metals, and shells to create designs that established her as a popular arts and crafts artist in southern California.

Elizabeth Eaton married William Waples Burton (d. 1930) in 1893, and they had a son, Philip (1893-1974), and a daughter, Helen (see Fig. 1). Less than a year after Helen's birth in 1897, Elizabeth Burton opened her first studio, which she described as a "small frame box affair of one room, designed for an office...not far from my home." (4) At first her work in leather showed a continuation of the California heritage and tradition of excellence in that medium, but she was also an innovator. Because of California's dependence on the outdoors as a way of life and its Spanish heritage, leather was an important material for equestrian gear, chests, and other accessories. During her first years in Santa Barbara, Burton invariably visited the shops along the main street and watched the leather craftsmen at work. In this environment, she began producing tooled leather chests of a medieval aspect decorated with brass nails and enameled designs (Fig. 2). Her output expanded to include cushions, panels, friezes, hangin gs, and all manner of leather decorations. Having mastered existing decorative techniques, in 1900 she applied for a patent for a "certain new and useful Improvement in Ornamental Leather-Work," (5) claiming an "improved method of producing shades of color and gradations and combinations of shades" as well as for "producing the effect of low relief in ornamental leather-work." (6) Although at first her claim was refused, she was granted the patent in 1905.

As her technical abilities grew and her ideas flourished, Burton moved her studio into a larger space and hired workmen to help her, although she continued to do all the designing and finishing. Most of her panels and screens featured complicated figural designs. Several depicted wild animals perched on branches, facing each other as if in a mirror image, in silhouette against a full moon and surrounded by foliage. She also created a large three-panel screen with two peacocks in a similar setting. In addition, she mastered the human figure in multiple-panel screens ranging from more static renderings of medieval knights to languorous fluid allegorical figures of the garden, chase, and sea, with complicated diaphanous robes in a Pre-Raphaelite manner. (7) Continually inspired by nature, Burton decorated many screens with floral sprays and more stylized organic designs.