Charles Arthur Fries (1854-1940)
Charles was born in Hillsboro, Ohio, in 1854 and apprenticed with a lithographer in Cincinnati, Ohio at the age of 15. While in Cincinnati, he attended the Art Academy there at a time when it was considered one of the most notable in the United States. He married in 1887 and moved to New York City where he set up a studio. When his wife began to have failing health, Fries moved to southern California’s healthy climate, first settling on the premises of the historic Mission San Juan Capistrano, and later moving to San Diego. In California he devoted his canvases to landscape painting and focused on the desert, the mountains, and eucalyptus trees.
His journal records seventeen hundred California oil paintings, many of them with eucalyptus trees, and he was highly successful there also as a lithographer. He died in 1940 in San Diego.
Fries paintings can be found in the following museums: Fleischer Museum, Arizona; Desert Caballeros Western Museum, Arizona; Irvine Museum, Irvine, California; San Diego Museum of Art.