Santa Cruz Forest Carbonero Creek Early Morning Original Oil by Lilllian Heath

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Santa Cruz Forest and Carbonero Creek with Redwoods in the early morning by Lillian Josephine Heath (American, 1864-1961).
Oil on … Read more Santa Cruz Forest and Carbonero Creek with Redwoods in the early morning by Lillian Josephine Heath (American, 1864-1961).
Oil on linen.
Signed "Lillian J. Heath" lower left. Circa 1940-1950.
Displayed in a giltwood frame.
Image, 18"H x 24"L excellent professionally cleaned
Frame, 23”H x 29”W x 1.25”D very good included as-is

Lillian Heath was one of the Jolly Daubers at the turn of the 19th-century and as a young student, married the senior artist and instructor, Frank Heath in Santa Cruz, California. Artists Frank and Lillian [Heath] by Margaret Koch [transcribed from Santa Cruz Public Library website]….Frank L. Heath courted Lillian Dake Storey during painting trips around Santa Cruz County back in the 1890s.
Those were the years when Lillian was riding a saddle horse daily from Santa Cruz to the Powdermill where she taught school. Today [1974] the Powdermill is Paradise Park.
Frank's actual proposal of marriage was delivered at Rocky Falls, a beautiful scenic place on Carbonero Creek. There he had constructed a painting platform with a perfect view of the rushing waters, and it was there that he asked Lillian in that formal day and age, to be his bride.
Frank was nearly 40 years old at the time, and Lillian was about 32.
She had always been interested in art and had talent to a large degree. She took a year's leave of absence from teaching school to travel alone to New York where she visited relatives and stayed to study china painting and the painting of miniatures which is an art in itself.
‘When I returned from New York I enrolled in the art classes of a Santa Cruz artist who was making a name for himself,’ she once said with a smile.
The artist was Frank L. Heath, and that was the start of their romance, she told me in 1959. She accepted Frank's proposal at Rocky Falls.
At the Heath home on Third Street, Beach Hill, Frank added a wing with a large studio workroom downstairs and several bedrooms upstairs. That was his wedding gift to his bride.
‘The Studio’ had a fireplace and big bay windows that looked out over the town of Santa Cruz and back to the mountains they both loved and painted many times. Lillian painted a set of tiles for the fireplace; they showed darting swallows in the clouds above a stream where song birds perched on tulles and water lilies floated.
In 1897 Lillian and Frank were married in the First Methodist Church and they moved into the home on Beach Hill, a house she continued to live in for 64 years.
Frank's father, Lucien Heath, was the first Secretary of State of Oregon. He came to Santa Cruz from Oregon in 1866 with his wife, Jane, and sons, Frank and Henry. A daughter, Lina, had died in Michigan where the Heaths lived before crossing the plains to Oregon in 1852.
Lillian, who was born in Milwaukee in 1864, came to Santa Cruz with her mother and stepfather, Judge and Mrs. William died Storey, in 1877. She graduated as a school teacher in 1882, and taught for seven years at the Powdermill School.
Lillian had joined the First Methodist Church (then the Methodist Episcopal Church) in 1877, on arrival here. She and Frank played active roles in the church's development and he served as occasional interim preacher. Lillian gave the church its beautiful rose window in memory of her mother and stepfather and Heath Hall at the church's old location on Church Street, was named in Frank and Lillian's honor.
They spent many happy days painting. Once in the spring, they took a horse and wagon trip to Yosemite to paint the famed falls and mountain crags.
Frank founded the Jolly Daubers, a local group he instructed and led on many an excursion around the county. See less