First Congregational Church, Soquel, California

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Beautiful historically significant oil painting of the First Congregational Church of Soquel by Mary DeNeale Morgan (American, 1868-1948). Signed lower … Read more Beautiful historically significant oil painting of the First Congregational Church of Soquel by Mary DeNeale Morgan (American, 1868-1948). Signed lower right corner. Exhibit label on verso. Canvas on masonite. Image, 24"H x 20"H. Displayed in rustic giltwood frame. Provenance: "1984, Dana Morgan Jr. from the estate of Mary DeNeal Morgan". Born in San Francisco in 1868, she was taken to Oakland in 1872, where the painter and teacher William Keith was her first teacher. She was precocious. In 1886 she enrolled in the California School of Design in San Francisco and studied with Emil Carlsen and Amédée Joullin until 1890. She paid her first visit to Carmel in 1903. In 1910 she returned to buy the studio and home of the late Sydney Yard, located next to what is now the Cypress Inn on Lincoln. From then on through the 1940's, her studio was filled with tourists, buyers, other artists and friends. The building, ever expanding with new rooms and more paintings, became a meeting place for civic activists. Her style was her own, sometimes containing elements of the Barbizon School, sometimes tonalist or California impressionist, but always distinctly her own, usually in vivid color with broad, bold strokes, sometimes laid on with a palette knife. When pressed to say what school of painting she belonged to, she replied that she was a "horse and buggy artist." She refused to be typed. Her favorite subject was the Monterey cypresses. When asked if she didn't tire of that subject, she replied that she "would stick by her cypress trees till they sink into the sea, or--what is just as tragic and final--be hopelessly built-around." In 1915, she won a Silver Medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco; in 1928 she was selected by Scribner's Magazine as one of the nation's foremost women artists. She rarely traveled outside Carmel, never outside the U.S., but had one-woman shows in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. See less