1950s Ralph Burke Tyree South Seas Hawaiian Girl Original Oil on Board

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Artist: Ralph Burke Tyree Title: South Seas Hawaiian Girl
Size: 20” x 22.75” framed; w: 12.75” x h:15.75” image Medium/Ground: … Read more Artist: Ralph Burke Tyree
Title: South Seas Hawaiian Girl
Size: 20” x 22.75” framed; w: 12.75” x h:15.75” image
Medium/Ground: Oil on Board
Year Created: 1950’s
Signature: Signed “Tyree” lower right
Condition: Original frame has foxing on linen insert from age. Painting in excellent condition.
Bio: (Excerpt from Askart.com)
Ralph Burke Tyree was an American artist who was a prolific portrait artist of the South Pacific peoples of the 20th century.
He was born June 30, 1921, in Irving, Kentucky. He had two sisters and five brothers and was the seventh of eight children born to Sally Turpin and Charles Green Tyree. The Tyree family moved to Delhi, California, while he was an infant. He attended Livingston High School but transferred to Turlock High for his last two years since they offered more art instruction. He graduated high school in 1939. In high school, he met his future wife, Marguerite (Margo) Almeida, and was awarded a scholarship to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland for a portrait he painted of her. He studied art there and later in San Francisco (California School of Fine Arts).
Tyree worked for Disney studios when WWII commenced on December 7, 1941. In January 1942, he joined the U.S. Marines and was deployed to American Samoa in the South Pacific. His military duties included accompanying reconnaissance flights over the islands and preparing topographic maps to illustrate areas of military activity. He was under the direct command of General Charles Price as his painter, and his projects included creating murals in the officers’ quarters, illustrating menus, painting portraits, and anything else the general wanted in the way of artwork.
His portrait art career began painting the officers and their loved ones while corresponding with 10,000-word love letters to his girlfriend Margo back home in Turlock, California. He was transferred to Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California, shortly before the end of World War II.
Tyree and Margo were married in June 1945, and he was discharged from the service in January 1946. They had seven children, six boys and a girl, born between 1946 and 1964. In 1952 the Tyree family traveled back to the South Pacific to live for years in places such as Guam, Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island of Hawaii. Often from there, he would travel to other island paradises: Palau, Fiji, Tahiti, Samoa, and the Solomon Islands over his thirty-year career.   Most of his first works were sensual island wahines in island beach and jungle settings. He painted primarily with oils on board, occasionally on canvas, and with pastels. See less