LeBaron: New exhibit showcases Grace Hudson's Hawaiian paintings

An important exhibit - “Days of Grace” - opened earlier this month at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah. It has set me thinking, not only about this remarkable Mendocino County woman who set the art world on its ear 100 years ago with her portraits of Pomo children, but of the social (and political) connections between this San Francisco region and the Hawaiian Islands at the turn of the 20th century.

In these thoroughly modern times of condos and time-shares and five-hour bargain flights, North Coast vacationers practically commute to Hawaii - some consider it like a second home. All this has been made possible by the advances in air travel, starting in the second half of the 20th century.

So it is good to be reminded that when Grace Hudson traveled there, for her health in 1901, it was an eight-day sea journey by steamship. (Think about it. Is there a place on earth that can’t be reached within eight days today?)

At that time, only the wealthy and privileged and the entrepreneurial - plus some venturesome early San Francisco Bohemians like Mark Twain - had partaken of the tropical delights in this Pacific paradise.

That’s why it seems surprising to consider what a social link had been forged between the old Sandwich Islands and the port of San Francisco.

It’s part of the history lesson we learn from what we might subtitle “Mrs.Hudson’s Excellent Adventure of 1901.”

We have begun with history but we are really backing into important arts news here. “Days of Grace,” (now through December 28) is a visit to Hudson’s Hawaii, a “rest cure” trip that came within three years of the United States’ accession of the islands as an official territory and just eights years after the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani.

The 36-year-old Hudson - born in Potter Valley, trained in the San Francisco School of Design in the heyday of the city’s Bohemian art culture - brought the same artistic acuity to her depictions of the Hawaiians (she called them South Sea Islanders) and Asians she met that had earned her success with her Pomo paintings.

As with the Indian portraits, most of her Hawaiian work is of women and children. This, too, makes it unique. Several well-known artists had produced Hawaiian paintings before Grace arrived, but most were men and, well … men didn’t paint babies.

Grace did. Both here and there.

The Hudson Museum’s director Sherrie Smith-Ferri and its registrar and historian Karin Holmes have gathered from private collectors here and in the islands for a first-ever exhibit, which will travel from Ukiah to the Honolulu Museum of Art in 2015.

Among them are paintings that “live” close-by. Clement Bruner, the turn-of-the 20th century Santa Rosa art dealer was one of her agents and there were several collectors in Sonoma County, including the late Gene Warfield, whose husband George met Grace in the islands before coming to Healdsburg to become president of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank.

There is a story in every one of these paintings - as there is in the hundreds of paintings of Pomo Indians Hudson created.

But the story of No. 197, the Hudson Museum’s newest acquisition, hits close to home. It is a painting done on a visit to the Big Island. The subject is a shy Hilo child holding a cat in each arm. Grace titled it “Punahele,” which means “pet” or “favorite.”

It was exhibited, to acclaim, with two other Hilo paintings on her return to Honolulu. Apparently, it is one that Grace brought home to Ukiah. Many others were given to Hawaiian friends and hosts as gifts and have remained in island collections).

“Punahele” was one of several Hudsons shown at the 1909 World’s Fair in Seattle and then consigned to Schussler Brothers, one of Hudson’s San Francisco dealers.

That’s where Charles Schmidt found it. Schmidt had developed an appreciation of art as a long-time employee of the Bohemian Club, where he had worked there since age 18, advancing to a manager’s position. He bought the painting from the Schusslers’ gallery in 1910 and it stayed in his family, with his daughter, Helene Marcucci, who had married a Sonoma County rancher and taught fourth grade at Lincoln School in Santa Rosa for many years.

Last month, Santa Rosa resident John Marcucci - Helene’s son, Schmidt’s grandson - donated the painting to the Hudson Museum.

Marcucci told museum officials he wanted to share the painting in his teacher-mother’s memory, with school children that come to the museum to learn about Grace Hudson and her work.

There are many facets to this exhibit, including Grace’s personal history, which is familiar to those who know the museum’s history, but for the uninitiated bears retelling.

She was the daughter of pioneers. Aurelius Carpenter, a photographer and newspaperman and his teacher/writer wife, Helen, came to Mendocino County from Kansas in 1859, the first white settlers in Potter Valley, where their twins Grace and Grant were born in 1865.

Grace Carpenter must have been what people would call “ a born artist,” because, by age 14, she was living in San Francisco attending the California School of Design, the first fine arts school west of the Mississippi. When her crayon drawing of Achilles won the important Alvord Medal she was just 16.

After an early and brief marriage, she came back to Ukiah to live with her parents. She met and married physician John Hudson, who had come to open a private practice and work as the area’s railroad doctor. Hudson, an ethnographer at heart (anthropologist was too new a term for the frontier in those years) was fascinated by the Pomo art and culture and may have been the first to recognize the importance of Pomo basketry.

It was John’s visits to the Pomo that took Grace back into the Indian community where she had grown up. Accompanying him on his study and basket-collecting trips, she began to paint the Indians - particularly the children.

It was a painting first described as “the papoose of whisky Jennie, ” a sleeping baby in its basket leaned against a tree, that started her on the path to real fame. In the next half century, she would paint 684 canvases of her Pomo neighbors, who knew her as “the painter lady.”

The Hawaiian paintings may have seemed almost an afterthought to her Indian work.

That’s why “Days of Grace,” is such an interesting exhibit. The catalog, a combined effort by Holmes and Smith-Ferri, reads like a novel - an exotic setting, a love story, a happy ending - as a publisher would say, “lavishly illustrated.”

The museum website, www.gracehudsonmuseum.org will provide days and hours for not only the museum but also Sun House, the home the Hudsons built in 1910, plus special program information.

If you don’t know Grace Hudson, this is an opportunity to get acquainted. If you do, it’s a new look at an old friend.