Painting California: “…a very valuable thing…”

“It seems to me it would be a very valuable thing if you could carry out your plan to make accurate water-color studies of the old buildings in this region. Accuracy is the first requirement; and such a series would have serious historic value. I hope you may be able to realize this plan...” (1) Charles Fletcher Lummis to Eva Scott Fényes regarding Fényes’ plan to paint the adobes of Old California, February 10, 1904.

The first time Eva Fényes painted in California it was 1888. At the time, her name was Eva Muse, and her ten year marriage to Marine Captain William Sulivane Muse was troubled and failing. Within a year of their arrival at Muse’s new assignment on Mare Island near San Francisco, she had left the Captain and California behind. In 1889, Eva took her daughter, the Muses’ only child, to New Mexico where she obtained her divorce and started a new life. Yet, California had forever captured her historian’s mind, her preservationist’s heart, and her artist’s eye, and one day she would come back.

Seven liberating and fulfilling years of travel passed before Eva returned, this time to Southern California, with her husband, Hungarian physician Dr. Adalbert Fényes, and her now seventeen year old daughter Leonora. Eva settled her family into Pasadena life. She enrolled Leonora in Miss Orton’s Classical School for Girls, engaged Pasadena society, and built her Moorish mansion on South Orange Grove Avenue. And, as always, she studied. She acquainted herself with plein-air artist Benjamin C. Brown and went out, as once before, to paint California with its golden landscapes and picturesque adobes and missions. She introduced herself to Charles Fletcher Lummis, founder of the Landmarks Club, an advocacy group dedicated to saving California’s crumbling Spanish missions.  She studied Spanish, explored California, New Mexico, and Mexico, and she read California history.

To compare this field sketch with the finished watercolor housed in the Library and Archives of the Autry, follow this link FEN.13 

While she learned and observed, Eva developed an idea for a project. According to her plan, she would systematically paint the crumbling adobes of California as they still survived. She wrote and introduced her idea to Charles Lummis in February 1904; and, with the same letter she enclosed her lifetime membership application joining Lummis’ newly founded Southwest Society of the Archaeological Institute of America. (2) Just days before Eva wrote this letter, Lummis had sent her the society’s constitution, its list of officers for the year, and a circular with the membership invitation. (3) The society would advocate for and work to preserve the material culture and social customs of the Native American, Spanish, and Mexican societies of the American Southwest. And eventually it would build a museum, the Southwest Museum. Eva Fényes would apply her knowledge of architecture, history, and archaeology to research, locate, photograph, and sketch en plein air many of the extant adobes of Old California. Her enthusiasm never waned. 

Eva Fényes worked for the next twenty-six years painting adobes for her project, from 1904 until 1930, and in her will she provided for their donation to the Southwest Museum. As Charles Lummis predicted, “...such a series would have serious historic value...” Initially the Southwest Museum on Mount Washington and later the Autry National Center in Griffith Park housed and preserved Eva Scott Fényes’ adobe paintings. “These works date from 1898 to a week before Mrs. Fényes’s death in 1930. Many of these adobes are no longer standing; in the case of some historic buildings, a Fényes painting is the only image that still exists.” (4) Digital images of these paintings can be viewed on the Autry National Center website.

Shown here are several of the field sketches Eva made in May 1904. These she preserved in Volume 8 of her fourteen volume collection of drawings and paintings that comprise her lifetime of sketching. (5)

To compare this field sketch with the finished watercolor housed in the Library and Archives of the Autry, follow this link FEN.152 

This adobe is not represented in The Autry’s Collections Online.

To compare this field sketch with the finished watercolor housed in the Library and Archives of the Autry, follow this link FEN.143 

To compare this field sketch with the finished watercolor housed in the Library and Archives of the Autry, follow this link FEN.144 

To compare this field sketch with the finished watercolor housed in the Library and Archives of the Autry, follow this link FEN.140  

- Julie Stires

This article was originally published on the Hometown Pasadena website in 2015.