Grace Carpenter Hudson (1865 to 1937)
Grace Hudson was a native Californian, born in Ukiah in 1865. Her family lived in one of the few clusters of white settlers who inhabited an area largely dominated by local Native American tribes including the Pomos, a tribe that she would later devote a great deal of her artistic career to illustrating. Hudson taught painting in her hometown and also became an accomplished illustrator for Sunset, Cosmopolitan and Western Field publications. In 1901, she made a year-long visit to Hawaii where she completed 26 canvases of Hawaiian, Japanese and Chinese children in the capital city Honolulu and Hilo (located on the east coast of the Big Island).
She then went on to accompany her husband, doctor turner ethnographer John Hudson, to the Oklahoma Territory where he would be studying the Pawnee Indians. Unfortunately while they were away from their Ukiah home, the earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed a great deal of her work as well as a vast number of Indian artifacts the couple had amassed during their previous excursions. Hudson painted actively in Ukiah until her death in 1937. The painter, who never had children, left her remaining paintings and artifacts to her husband’s nephew, Mark Carpenter, who soon after her death turned the couple’s estate into a museum.
Information courtesy of Skinner, Inc., May 2006.
In a short biography, the Grace Hudson Museum relates that “Grace was born to well-educated pioneer parents in Potter Valley, California. She showed an early talent for portraiture that was developed by professional training in San Francisco in the late 1870′s. In 1891…she painted a portrait of an Indian child, National Thorn, that was first in a numbered series of over 684 oils, the last completed in 1935. Nearly all of her native subjects were local Pomo peoples.”
Information courtesy of Skinner, Inc., May 2004.