Timeline

James Everett Stuart was a prolific painter of the west coast, said to have produced over 5,000 western landscape paintings during his lifetime. His work is well-known for its moody, dramatic style, suggestive of the French Barbizon School.

Born in Bangor, Maine in 1852, Stuart moved to California with his parents at the age of eight and settled on a ranch near Rio Vista. He went on to become a prize student under Virgil Williams and Raymond Dabb Yelland at the California School of Design in the late 1870s.

Stuart co-founded the legendary Bohemian Club of San Francisco in 1872 along with several journalists and artists, who created the club for the association of gentlemen connected professionally with literature, art, music, or drama. Among its members were well-known California artists and writers such as: William Keith, Arthur William Best, Giuseppi Leone Cadenasso, Thomas Hill, Granville Redmond Virgil Williams, Samuel Marsden Brookes and Jules Tavernier.

The artists and writers gathered regularly at the Russian River in Northern California for a summer encampment, a tradition continued by current Bohemian Club members. The organization also gathered a significant amount of funds for the purchase of a stand of redwoods in Monte Rio, California. This scenic area served as the site of the summer encampment for over a hundred years, and countless artists have drawn inspiration from the natural beauty of the land.

In 1879, after graduating from the California School of Design, Stuart settled in The Dalles, Oregon, supporting himself by painting signs for businesses that were rebuilding after a fire had burned down the town. In a reminiscence published in the Rio Vista River News-Herald, Stuart recalled, “During the morning hours on Sundays, I made color paintings direct from nature of the wonderful subjects near the town, and when work was slack would take a camping and sketching trip to some nearby interesting places… and in that manner secured many of my most important subjects while working at commercial painting to earn my daily bread.”

Stuart later migrated to Portland, Oregon and became a leading member of the art scene there for several years. His name appears first in a list of the founding members of the Portland Art Club, preceding those of such fine painters as Cleveland Rockwell and Grafton Tyler Brown.

By the early 20th century, Stuart was a highly successful and well-known painter. His paintings are currently in the collections of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the California State Library in Sacramento, University of Southern California, Los Angeles County Museum and the White House.