Lorenzo Palmer Latimer, California watercolor painter

Magazine Antiques, April, 2005 by Alfred C. Harrison, Jr.

In 1884 Latimer joined the newly founded Palette Club in San Francisco, which was presided over by Tavernier. The Palette Club was formed by artists in rebellion against various policies embraced by the San Francisco Art Association, especially the association's management by wealthy businessmen, rather than by the artists themselves. The older institution had offended some artists by allowing unscrupulous artists and dealers to rent its exhibition gallery to hold auctions that undercut local studio prices with inferior paintings known as "potboilers." (8) The Palette Club held exhibitions in competition with those of the San Francisco Art Association, but soon became an object lesson in why it was a good idea to allow businessmen to run an organization composed of artists. By the end of 1885, with Tavernier having fled his creditors to Hawaii, the club quietly faded from view. Latimer and the other members of the Palette Club were welcomed back into the San Francisco Art Association, and Latimer resumed sending his paintings to the association's exhibitions.

Few Latimer paintings from the 1880s are known today, perhaps because his teaching duties prevented him from executing many works deemed worthy of preservation. One major oil painting, owned until recently by collateral descendants of his stepmother, is Geyser Peak from McDonnell Creek, Sonoma County (Pl. II). Dated 1887, this view, close to his family's property near Windsor, is a detailed transcription of nature given a poetic enhancement by the treatment of light and atmosphere. As such, it is very much in the Hudson River school aesthetic, which was rapidly being displaced in California by the influence of the French Barbizon school. Nevertheless, it is a beautiful and authoritative painting by a sophisticated professional artist. Its exploration of the light of dawn, when wisps of fog impose a gauzy harmony over the landscape, is a theme Latimer treated often during his career.

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Judge Latimer seems to have supported his son's artistic ambitions and patronized him during the 1880s. The young artist visited the family property in Sonoma County frequently, ostensibly to make studies for paintings, but perhaps also to escape his urban life. In April 1888 the San Francisco Chronicle reported that "Latimer ... is on a ranch in Sonoma County ... [with] a class and is doing better than well." (9) But Latimer was not doing well. Later that year, the Chronicle noted that he had moved to Sonoma County, (10) and then there is no further mention of him in San Francisco newspapers until 1891. In 1898 Latimer told a newspaper reporter:

the greatest trial I ever had was when my health failed and I had to go
into the country, with strict orders from my physician not to touch my
brush for three years.... I felt like a caged bird, and that was the
greatest struggle I endured for art's sake. (11)

We do not know the nature of Latimer's illness, but perhaps his bohemian way of life in San Francisco had caught up with him.