Effie's Return to Bisbee
We open her first Bisbee solo exhibit since 1921
by Steven Carlson, Curator
Welcome to another EFFIEgram tracing the art and life of Arizona’s earliest Impressionist desert landscape painter - Effie Anderson Smith (1869-1955).
Our current exhibit Desert Paradise: The Art & Life of Effie Anderson Smith at Sigler Western Museum in Wickenburg (formerly Desert Caballeros) featuring 55 of Effie’s finest canvases continues on view through February 15, 2026.
IMPRESSIONS OF THE DESERT - our next exhibit - will soon open in Bisbee!
Effie Anderson Smith had been painting landscapes in oil as early as 1884. And she appears to have continued drawing and painting for 35 years before she felt ready for her first solo exhibit - or at least - the first solo exhibit we know of.
Starting around 1904 she was beginning to renew and refresh her technique with noted California Impressionists in the San Francisco Bay Area, including May Bradford Shockley, and from around 1914 onward with Southern California Impressionists in Laguna Beach with one of that art colony’s illustrious founders - Anna Althea Hills. But it was the German born artist Jean (Gene) Mannheim, a frequent Laguna Beach visitor - who provided the greatest inspiration to Effie during her studies with him in Pasadena at the Stickney Memorial School of Fine Art.
Effie may have influenced both Hills and Mannheim to consider the nearby California deserts as worthy subjects of their own paintings, as it seems both artists began regular visits to inland California desert locations to paint in the years after Effie began studying with each of them (1914-16). No doubt, some of her Effie-thusiasm for painting en plein air in her beloved Arizona desert home rubbed off on them.
Effie’s time in the Los Angeles area, while her son attended the Harvard School, provided her with about four years of sporadic training in California Impressionism, which led to her deciding to dispense with a great deal of her previous conception of landscape painting and come up with her amalgam of techniques to paint successfully in Arizona’s brilliant light and capture the vast distances, the clouds and especially the light itself. She took what she felt was applicable from her recent studies with these California Impressionist masters and, on advice from her Pasadena mentor Jean Mannheim, went back to her desert home at Pearce in 1917 to work out her artistic approach.
She seemed set to begin displaying her newly found Impressionist technique in her own exhibits in 1918, if not for the outbreak of the so-called Spanish Influenza Pandemic that lasted from 1918 into 1920. So it’s perhaps no surprise that Effie’s newly acquired confidence as an artist, having found strength in her evolving style of landscape painting after her recent studies, had to wait until the pandemic has passed in 1921 for her first solo exhibit to take place.
Effie made her solo exhibit debut at the Bisbee Woman’s Club on March 23rd, 1921. At least, it’s the first known solo exhibit we have a record of, thanks to newspapers of the time.
It would be the first of dozens of such exhibits that she would present, along with insightful talks, that would stretch through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s up to her 80th birthday in 1949.
Bisbee is also the place where Effie married for the second time, as a 25 year old widow, to Andrew Young Smith in 1895 at the Bessemer Hotel.
Now - for the first time since her Bisbee exhibit over a century ago - we will open a display of Effie’s best art - highlighting familiar vistas near Bisbee - with a rotating selection of her finest works - at the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum starting Friday, January 16th.
Over the next year many of the paintings we have recently exhibited in our Sigler / Desert Caballeros Western Museum exhibit in Wickenburg will find their way into our rotating display in Bisbee - plus - some newly rediscovered paintings by Effie that have not been exhibited publicly since the 1930s!
Please join us in Bisbee on Friday, January 16th as we kick off another major exhibit of the art of Effie Anderson Smith - this time in the town where her first solo exhibit took place in 1921 and where several of her most important life events took place.
Once you get to Bisbee, the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum is super easy to find. In fact, you can’t miss it! It’s at 5 Copper Queen Plaza, directly in front of the glorious old Copper Queen Hotel and just steps from the many restaurants, art galleries and antique shops you are sure to enjoy browsing before and after your Museum visit.
IMPRESSIONS OF THE DESERT will be on display from January 16, 2026 into January 2027 in Historic Bisbee. See you there!
