CHAPTER XVII
Women Painters, Present-Day Advancement
California Group. A Group In the Southland. A Group In the Middle West. Concerning Painters of Flowers.
Art is not only long but is filling out from ocean to ocean with the onward trend of the twentieth century; and what was difficult yet "beautiful for Pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness," has become the pathway for American progress, culture, and art, that were bound to follow the trail of the prospector and the prairie schooner across the continent.
Grandeur and beauty modified the way for those who had eyes to see, and future generations must not be allowed to forget that climatic conditions, Indians, and animal life have been large factors in our characteristic American art.
Our World's Fair held at Seattle, and the Panama-Pacific at San Francisco in 1915, have called together now and again groups of earnest workers in their several lines of interests, emphasizing the progress for and of the world, no less than for American interests.
Naturally men took the lead in depicting the landscape and animal life of mountain and plain, but as all western states have become peopled from the east, the necessities and refinements of life have developed rapidly. And we are reminded that art keeps the pace, and that woman no less than man has set the pace.
Mary Curtis Richardson became a California pioneer at the age of two. Her father, a young Wall Street business man, had gone west with the gold rush of 'forty-nine. One year later her mother with the three children went out to join him, traveling by the Panama route. Little Mary Curtis was carried across the Isthmus on the back of an Indian, and arrived finally in the port of San Francisco when that city was a huddle of tents.
Her earliest years were passed in a great fortified adobe hut upon the windswept plains north of the Bay; but the home scene shifted as her father's business interests changed. She lived in three separate sections of the state before she was twelve.
It was a picturesque and colorful world boiling with crude life, a society not yet organized, a climate given to floods and occasional tremors. No doubt the child accepted it as every-day life, but she was an unusually sensitive and
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