Jeanette Maxfield Lewis (1894 – 1982)

Landscape, c. 1930-40s, oil on panel, signed lower right, 16 x 20 inches

$7500

Jeanette Maxfield Lewis was a California-based landscape painter and etcher. Born in Oakland, she spent much of her career as an artist in Northern California and along the California coast. Lewis attended Castilleja School for Girls in Palo Alto where she was first exposed to fine art and was inspired to pursue painting. She then studied at the California School of Fine Art, with Winold Reiss and Hans Hofmann in New York where she was exposed to core modernist principles, and Gottardo Piazzoni and Armin Hansen in California. For a time, she worked for Foster and Kleiser, an outdoor advertising company with a paint factory in San Francisco. As a fine artist, she is best known for detailed moody etchings and brightly colored, loosely brushed and expressive modernist landscapes of California usually painted in oils, such as the present example. Her professional career extended into the early 1960s, but her artistic practice stopped with the death of her husband in 1964.

An avid joiner, Lewis was a member of many arts organizations across the United States, including the Philadelphia Print Club, Print Club Albany, National Association of Women Artists, San Francisco Association of Women Artists, Oakland Art League, Carmel Art Association, Society of Western Artists, Northwest Printmakers, California Society of Etchers, and Southern Printmakers. During her long career, she exhibited at many of the United States' most significant arts institutions and exhibitions, such as the Corcoran Gallery, National Academy of Design, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Golden Gate International Exhibition, and the New York World’s Fair. Lewis often exhibited along the West Coast at the California State Fair, the California State Library, and Santa Cruz Art League. She was honored with solo shows at the Crocker Art Museum, Palace of the Legion of Honor, Gumps Art Gallery, and the Fresno Art Center. A Centennial solo exhibition with an accompanying catalog was held at the Monterrey Peninsula Museum of Art in 1994. Lewis’ work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery, the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the California State Library, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and the Fresno Art Center, Delaware Art Museum, among others. She is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.