Lorenzo Palmer Latimer, California watercolor painter

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

Despite displaying aspects of Hudson River school and Barbizon styles, Latimer's watercolors owe a great debt to the tradition of topographical watercolors that became popular in England during the nineteenth century, in which real scenes from nature were given a poetic embellishment by the artist. By the 1860s, American painters had started to emulate the British watercolor artists, and the American Watercolor Society was founded in 1866. The California painters William Keith and Juan Buckingham Wandesforde (1817-1902) exhibited watercolors in the 1860s, but in San Francisco watercolor remained primarily a medium for teaching students until the end of the nineteenth century.

Latimer's emotional response to the beauty found in nature made it impossible for him to succumb to the increasingly fashionable trends in art that were leading to modernism. Working far from the cultural capitals of the world, he urged his students to stay in California and paint the places they loved best. "Go abroad to study if you can and will," he advised, "but return to your birthplace to do your life's work.... If the redwoods or the beach or the plains are yours by right of birth, go back to them, and you will paint with a deeper feeling than in any other spot." (21)

By the early twentieth century, Latimer had developed an approach to watercolor painting that would not change for the rest of his long life, despite the revolution in art that occurred with the advent of modernism. His refusal to change with the times eventually pushed him to the margins of the official art world in San Francisco, but for a while he was regarded as one of its leading figures. In 1898 he was elected second vice president of the Mark Hopkins Institute, the senior artist on the board; and for ten years he served on the rejection committee of its exhibitions, a thankless job usually given to universally respected artists whose own work was beyond reproach. For ten years he was chairman of the committee that awarded scholarships to needy students seeking admission to the institute's school, but he also worked tirelessly in such lesser roles as artist in charge of decorations for the institute's annual Mardi Gras Ball. Latimer saw art as an enhancement to everyday life and was not too proud to accept commissions for jobs like decorating curtains for the Majestic Theatre in San Francisco and the Veterans Home of California in Napa County. (22)

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In addition to his role as an exhibiting painter and fine arts administrator, Latimer also excelled as an art teacher both at the Mechanics' Institute and in the private classes he taught in his San Francisco studio. Most of his students were women, often from prosperous backgrounds, who took up painting as a decorous pastime. Perhaps reflecting on his own somewhat comfortable situation, which had allowed him to dawdle in his early career, Latimer saw poverty as the artist's friend. Discussing talented but impoverished women painters, he wrote, "Nothing brings out ability like the need to exercise it. Their struggles have been hard, but they owe much of their accomplishment to their so-called misfortune." (23)