Thaddeus Welch, California landscape painter

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2003 by Alfred C. Jr. Harrison

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On his return from Australia in the summer of 1892, Welch was hired by the firm of Reed and Gross in Chicago to paint four twenty-by-thirty-foot pictures and three smaller works to be installed in the California Building at the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. Among other subjects, the works included such titles as The Golden Gate, San Francisco; Christmas at Pasadena; and Irrigation at Kern Delta. (9) With all of this employment, Welch should have been experiencing a period of prosperity, but, reunited with Ludmilla in Chicago, he was so short of cash that he could not afford to pay rent. Instead, he and his wife squatted in an abandoned opera house that had been used by artists preparing work for the exposition. Welch's biographer, Helen V. Broekhoff, Ludmilla's close friend and confidante, pointed to the probable cause of this lack of good fortune: "The unfortunate habit [drinking] formed in those sorrowful days in Munich [caused by the unhappy marriage] ... augmented their misery and contributed not a little to their misfortunes." (10)

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Toward the end of 1893, Welch was commissioned by Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe (1832-1913) to paint views of the incline railway on the Mount Lowe Railway near Pasadena. But when the Welches arrived in southern California, Lowe told them that economic setbacks made it impossible for him to undertake the project. To survive, the Welches painted decorations on the sides of fiesta wagons and did other such hackwork. Living in Los Angeles with a studio in the Temple Block, Welch did execute two excellent paintings of southern California scenery. The Arroyo Seco (private collection) and View of Los Angeles (Pl. I). The latter depicts the Los Angeles County Courthouse built in 1891 in a landscape of palm trees and snowy peaks. Late afternoon light adds a poetic element to what might have been seen as a purely documentary transcription of a new and not particularly artistic urban environment. (11) Now, of course, the painting remains the best, and perhaps the only, professional portrayal of Los Angeles as it looked in the early 1890s.

Discouraged by their inability to sell paintings in Los Angeles, Welch and his wife decided to try their luck in San Francisco, to which they moved in 1894. Living in the city was beyond their means, and they settled in the recently established town of Mill valley in Marin County, north of San Francisco, camping out at least part of the time. A photograph of Ludmilla sitting in front of a tent next to her husband's sketching box inscribed "Mill Valley, Cal" survives in a family album (Fig. 3). Hiking through the rolling hills that surrounded the town near the base of Mount Tamalpais, they were enchanted by the beauties of the rural environment, where widely spaced dairy farms were the only tokens of human habitation and peacefully grazing cows dotted the hillsides. They eked out a living selling paintings of Marin County scenery for modest prices.