by Steven Carlson, Curator
DEAR FRIENDS - An earlier version of this EFFIEgram went out last night in error. Please enjoy reading this UPDATED, more polished version. I always recommend reading these in the Substack App - which you can get to in the e-mail version by clicking on the link at the top of the EFFIEgram that says READ IN APP - to always get the latest, final, updated version. Thanks a bunch for reading!
And now…
Welcome to another EFFIEgram tracing the art and life of Arizona’s earliest Impressionist desert landscape painter - Effie Anderson Smith (1869-1955).
We consider Effie Anderson Smith to be an artist primarily focused on Arizona desert painting, capturing the vast hazy distances, the majestic mountains and dramatic canyons that make Arizona a paradise for certain artists who have a visceral response to these vistas.
There were two brief periods after Effie’s move to Arizona in 1895 when she resided for a significant period outside Arizona. The Smiths returned to Pearce and Cochise County regularly during these times. They never gave up their affection and affinity for the Sulphur Springs Valley once they set down roots there. But there were good reasons to be absent for a few extended periods and during these residencies Effie appears to have kept going with her art.
As statehood dawned for Arizona in 1912, the Smiths decided their son could not go to high school in nearby Douglas with the Mexican Revolution underway and bullets flying several block across the border into town during battles and sporadic skirmishes across the line that erupted between 1910 and 1918. So a part-time residency in California for the Smiths was arranged while Effie’s son attended high school in Los Angeles between 1912 and about 1916. That is when Effie also connected closely and studied with several well known California Impressionists in Laguna Beach and Pasadena. She is known to have returned to those Southern California art colonies frequently until 1929.
And then also, for a period of several months in 1924, she resided in Northern New Mexico while her husband was attending to his investments in cattle ranching and agriculture there, in and around Colfax, Maxwell, and Cimarron, New Mexico.
Add to that her extensive travels in the very early 1900s in Central and Northern Arizona - not only to the Grand Canyon, but to Flagstaff, the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert. To Sedona, Oak Creek Canyon, and beyond.
In the last few years a number of paintings by Effie have emerge which are clearly signed or initialed in her hand which do not bear a date - as most of her paintings do starting in the mid-1920s - and in these cases these painting’s titles have also not survived. So we are left with a number of beautiful and intriguing mysteries on canvas.
Our 3 Mysteries here relate to the dates and titles of these paintings by Effie. Or more to the point, the lack of any date or title inscribed on them.
What we know of these early art works we’ve had to piece together from the individuals and families who have owned them over several generations, and whose parents, grandparents or even great grandparents knew the artist. It helps that these canvases each do have a signature - often not easy to find - but close examination and often de-framing the painting leads to the discovery of the signature or initials which are sometimes, in her early paintings, right along the extreme lower edge of the canvas, often obscured by the lip of the frame.
Why no dates on some Effie paintings? (Prior to 1920)
There are many reasons why an artist like Effie Anderson Smith may not date a work she was creating. Here are a few…
She broke off work on it for some reason - we’ll never know why.
It may have been merely a study in which Effie was experimenting - working out some aspects of composition, or the color possibilities - refining her approach for a portion of another larger canvas she was preparing to create later.
She did not feel it fully achieved the depth or distance or balance - or some other effect she intended. And so, it was left unfinished for the remainder of her life.
Or - as in the case of many artistic masters of ages past, and even today - they were simply inconsistent about inscribing a date on their finished works.
Ask any artist and they can probably give you a few reasons why they may not immediately choose to sign and date a work. In Effie’s case, she was the wife of a prominent businessman and active in her own civic activities. She was also a devoted mother, too. During the Commonwealth Mine’s boom years (1897-1912 ) when the little mining camp of Pearce was buzzing with activity and the house she and her husband and young children occupied was a meeting place (also known as the Mine Manager’s house) for business and social activities, the interruptions may have been daily and constant.
And so, if the enemy of creativity is - interruptions - she had plenty of those. And this may have disrupted and broken her concentration - and slowed her progress in completing paintings. Not to mention, getting them ready to sell (with date inscribed).
Certainly, if it was a commissioned painting, Effie seems to have signed and dated those works by the time of delivery. But if it was a painting that Effie created en plein air and would perhaps refine and finish later in her studio as her schedule allowed, the thought of signing - and inscribing a date of completion - may have been something she did not place on the painting until she was absolutely sure she was done with it.
We know Leonardo da Vinci hauled around with him several really huge canvases that he worked on for years and never felt truly satisfied enough to finish them, even though today we see them as masterpieces.
In Effie’s case, we know that the birth of what was probably the first large scale painting she created of the Grand Canyon - the prototype of a series of at least 22 Grand Canyon works - absorbed her attention on and off for seven years before she considered it fully finished.
We see this in the fact that Effie signed and dated this canvas twice! Once in 1928 - perhaps at the time she created it with her major Eastern U.S. exhibit tour in mind - but as she seems to have been continuing to work on it simultaneously with several other views of the Grand Canyon she needed for that same exhibit - she returned to it many times between 1928 and 1935 - long after the watershed 1931 exhibits in the East - before she felt satisfied enough to inscribe the second and final date on it. During that time she had created at least 4 other views of the Grand Canyon - including another quite similar to this one - but not identical - and views of other South Rim vantage points. This painting is the only known case where she dated a canvas twice.
How this painting survived the fire in 1929 that burned her house to the ground is another mystery, and a miracle - but unwinding that tale is for another time.
From 1925 onward it appears that all Effie’s paintings bear dates of completion. Prior to that time, we rarely see dates on Effie’s canvases. And we can say firmly that all Effie’s undated paintings are in an earlier, more restrained literal style that does not fully employ the impressionist technique that brought her many admirers and critical acclaim to her FULLY MATURE works, such as the glorious Grand Canyon above.
We may never know if it was a mentor, an influential artist friend, or one of Effie’s solitary series of studies she worked on in isolation that provided the breakthrough, and allowed Effie’s style and technique to evolve and reach it’s zenith. But we can point to the year everything changed. We see a significant revelation and technical breakthrough in the period of 1925-26 that brought her art to a new level of mastery.
The Early Undated Effie Works (c. 1908-1924)
This little painting above is known to have been painted in 1923 but it has only a signature and no date. The last owner of the painting, Jean McNeil Stephen of Salem, Oregon owned this paintings for much of her life. Her older brother was around eight years of age when Jean was born and he recalled Mrs. A.Y. Smith (Effie) sitting on the pergola of the McNeil family home on West Speedway in Tucson while she finished this canvas not long after Jean was born in 1923. The scene is a view of the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, from the north side of those mountains near Oracle. The location was a favorite spot of the McNeil family for camping. There is a rare inclusion (for Effie) of small buildings or campsite tents in the distance.
The painting below is another undated gem of Effie’s early style. And in a rare departure from her usual desert art focused on the raw natural beauty of Arizona’s deserts, mountains and canyons - usually without any signs of human life or intervention - this work not only gives us an adobe structure, but some very specific features that seem to be a literal depiction of a home Effie knew. And yet, it is not any of the homes she is known to have resided in at the mining camp in Pearce. In fact, this adobe with its lodge poles, ladder, kiva ovens and other surroundings seems more like the type of dwelling one might expect to find in Northern New Mexico.
New Mexico was where Effie first came to in the west after leaving Arkansas, and it’s where several members of her extended family lived, including her Mother Adelia Anderson and brother George Anderson, from the late 1890s into the early 1900s.
The area in Northern New Mexico around Maxwell is where Effie’s husband A.Y. Smith was invested in cattle ranching and sugar beets farming. The Smiths also had other friends in Northern New Mexico, so it’s possible Effie painted this adobe on commission or as a gift for a friend. The family who currently owns this painting and recently brought it to our attention has notes from their grandmother going back a couple generations when this painting came into their family’s hands in 1916.
Once again, there is no date inscribed by Effie on the painting, and in another unusual decision for a painting that she clearly lavished a great deal of attention and detail on, she chose to write only her initials at the extreme lower right edge of the canvas - again where it was almost certain to be obscured by the lip of the frame.
We can see that both this painting and the one above are in a much more literal style, without the same emotional impressionistic response to the scene as the Grand Canyon painting evokes - in style or color - and the color palette of these two paintings does not yet embrace what became the standard of Effie’s greatest works of the late 1920s, 30s, and early 1940s where the base color is often violet or blue. The earth tones and greens dominate these two paintings and the effect of the clouds may be a bit less masterful here than her later works.
One also notes the similarity in the profile of the frames in this and the Santa Catalina Mountain painting above. The same carved wavy motif on the frame’s edge and the scooped cove of these carved wood frames emulating hammered copper - one a bit more burnished than the other - were likely both created by the same frame maker and selected for these specific paintings by the artist.
And then we have this painting below - signed but undated - in this case the signature is up above the frame’s lip in full view for the discerning eye that knows where to look in the grassy area in the lower foreground. We are not showing a frame here because the original frame has been lost long ago. This painting is likely from a later time than those above. Effie is certainly approaching her mature style here. Soon most of her paintings would look something like this - true desert art. The violet is there now but enfolded among many others. It’s paintings like these that caused one Arizona critic to refer to Effie as a ‘colorist’.
From the Benson News, December 11, 1926 we read…
From the saturated colors of the desert to the hues of the mountain tops and shades of the canyons the noted colorist depicted Southern Arizona as only one could, who loved the country and was in sympathy with its every mood…
Again, at variance with so many of her mature paintings of the late 1920s and 30s which seem to proceed from the Impressionist’s base color of violet, with its polar opposite color being yellow for the capture of Arizona’s brilliant sunlight, this undated canvas seems to glow from the center outward.
It’s a different range of colors with a strong emphasis on the salmon or coral hues in the hills that she later used more sparingly to create light effects to depict her emotional reaction to sunlight illuminating mountains and canyons in early morning, or late afternoon and evening, such as in these Grand Canyon paintings by Effie.
What to look for in a genuine Effie painting’s signature…
Most of her signatures are proudly inscribed a couple inches above the edge of the canvas. And while sometimes a bit hard to see because of the colors she chose on one corner or the other where she wrote her name and a two digit date, it’s usually as E. A. Smith ## (two digit year) and sometimes the initials of her husband are added - as most married women of the era were known under their husband’s name and/or initials. In Effie’s case, AY or (AY) or even Mrs. AY (as in Mrs. A.Y. Smith) are seen.
If you own or can borrow a UV (ultraviolet / black) Light, you can have some fun being an art detective!
This sometime makes Effie’s signature stand out when in the dark - in ways your eyes cannot easily see the signature in normal light.
Fortunately for us, Effie’s most accomplished and renown paintings - especially the works she was most proud of during her most active mature years as an artist (1925-1949) are consistently signed and dated.
As so many of Effie Anderson Smith’s earlier works perished when her home and studio in Pearce burned to the ground in September 1929, we are grateful to the families whose pioneer grandparents and great grandparents, who once knew the artist, who received, preserved and cherished paintings for Effie’s early years in Arizona and beyond - and whose descendants have so kindly and generously taken the time to bring these early Effie gems to our attention.
Our very Special Thanks go especially to those families who have made available - or even gifted - these intriguing paintings from the early years of Effie’s artistic journey - to our exhibits and permanent museum collection.
Thank you for your interest in the Dean of Arizona Women Artists, Pioneer Painter Effie Anderson Smith (1869-1955).
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COMING IN OUR NEXT ISSUES…
News of Fall 2024 & Spring 2025 Exhibits.
News about Fine Art PRINTS of Effie’s Most Popular Paintings - Coming in 2025.