Lorenzo Palmer Latimer, California watercolor painter

Also in the fall of 1894 Latimer was selected as one of six artist members of the Guild of Arts and Crafts, a select group of artists, architects, musicians, and writers, who saw it as their role to impose higher standards on San Francisco culture. Unfortunately, as one observer noted, the Guild of Arts and Crafts quickly started to resemble the short-lived Palette Club in its inability to function in a business-like manner. (16) The guild limped along for several years, holding an exhibition in 1896 in which Latimer was a generous participant, (17) but it never became the cultural arbiter that its founders envisaged. Nevertheless, Latimer's inclusion in this elite group was impressive for a young artist who had never studied abroad.

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It was during the 1890s that Latimer became known as the leading painter of redwood forests. As mentioned earlier, in 1894 his oil painting entitled Redwoods won a prize at the Midwinter Fair. This may be the painting, dated 1894, now entitled Pathway through the Redwoods (Pl. VI). Couched in the dark palette often found in forest interiors by California tonalist painters such as Keith, Latimer's redwood paintings of the 1890s also show a Barbizon influence in their open foregrounds and the way a path or creek bed leads the eye deep into the picture plane. On the other hand, by substituting redwoods for the oaks found in California or the forest of Fontainebleau, he introduces a note of sublimity into the picture that is a Hudson River school attribute alien to the Barbizon aesthetic.

In 1899 Latimer wrote an article for the Overland Monthly in which he described the challenge of painting redwoods--of capturing

the delicacy of color tone, the feathery foliage, and the graceful lines
of the bark, with its variegated coloring, the rich carpet of
green,... the rank growth of ferns, broken here and there with some
fallen tree. (18)

He considered these forests cathedrals of nature, where the trees took on human qualities. "We venerate their dignity, we admire their strength and endurance, we love their tenderness and beauty," he continued. Significantly, he praised Tavernier, dead some ten years by 1899, for his depictions of the redwoods, writing: "The only man who ever painted redwoods with that divine feeling which they inspire, was Jules Tavernier."

Latimer's watercolors of redwoods show a brighter, more joyful palette than his oils. In paintings such as In the Fish Hatchery Canyon, Ukiah, California (Pl. I), he sought to create the visual equivalent of his prose description of the redwood forest:

note the grace with which the great furrows are plowed in the bark, the
branches swinging downward embracing the trunk tenderly with their
feathery leaves, the delicate violet of the trunk above, streaked with
green and red as it nears the ground until lost in a bed of ferns. (19)

The viewer of the forest, as well as the viewer of the artist's depiction of it, undergoes a therapeutic experience. "Can any one wonder," Latimer asked, "when he goes into these forests tired in spirit and flesh, that he comes away rested and refreshed?" (20)