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Theodore Wores is the most important painter you’ve never heard of.
Said to be the first professional artist born and raised in San Francisco, in his long career he had a drinking contest with Oscar Wilde, became one of the first American artists to travel to Asia and the Pacific, and has work hanging in the White House...yet the fame of contemporaries like Whistler eludes him. Blame it on the San Francisco earthquake!
Born to parents of the Gold Rush generation who immigrated to California from Austria-Hungary in 1848, he grew up a stone’s throw from Chinatown, and was one of the first to attend what would become the San Francisco Art Institute. As a teenager he studied in Munich, which rivaled Paris as the world capital of the arts after the Franco-Prussian War left Paris in ruins.
Back in San Francisco, he became a member of the Bohemian Club, a pretentious hipster-y sounding lot who decided what was hot and what was not in the 19th century West Coast art world. When the club entertained Oscar Wilde on his American tour in 1882, the dandyish Queer icon drank the “tough” California bros under the table, much to their surprise. Wores painted Wilde’s portrait, and Wilde later helped him break into the London gallery scene, where he also became friends with James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
Wores had a lifelong passion for travel, visiting Japan, Canada, Venice, Spain, Hawaii and Samoa, where he crashed at Robert Louis Stevenson’s pad. In Hawaii, he painted The Lei Maker, his most famous work and considered the most famous Hawaiian portrait of all time, making it the Mona Lisa of Hawaii. Wores’ biographer called him, “The ethnographer with a pallet,” referring to his knack for painting ethnically diverse subjects.
Tragically, most of his work burned in the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906, including the portrait of Oscar Wilde. Wores didn’t let it get him down, going on to become dean of his teen alma mater (San Francisco Art Institute), and marrying a beautiful, much younger socialite, Carolyn Bauer.
Though his life mirrored his contemporary Paul Gauguin's in many ways, Wores was the anti-Gauguin. He hated Gauguin's South Seas paintings, and trashed modern art generally, saying, “It is a disease...I shall remember the hideous monstrosities of cubism and futurism only as fantastic nightmares of the past.” Ouch! He died of a heart attack in 1939, so he didn’t live long enough to see those cubist hacks like Picasso eclipse his own prestige. But Wores’ own legacy is considerable, with works in the Smithsonian and the White House. You have to be pretty damn good to get your stuff in Obama’s crib.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Theodore Wores
Theodore Wores (August 1, 1859 – September 11, 1939) was an American painter. He was from San Francisco, and travelled extensively including periods in Germany, Japan, Hawaii, and Samoa.
Life
Theodore Wores was born on August 1, 1859, in San Francisco, son of Joseph Wores and Gertrude Liebke. His father worked as a hat manufacturer in San Francisco.
Wores began his art training at age twelve in the studio of Joseph Harrington, who taught him color, composition, drawing and perspective. When the California School of Design (later known as San Francisco Art Institute) opened in 1874, Wores was one of the first pupils to enroll. After one year at that school under the landscape painter Virgil Macey Williams, he continued his art education at the Royal Academy in Munich where he spent six years. He also painted with William Merritt Chase and Frank Duveneck. Wores returned to San Francisco in 1881. He went to Japan for two extended visits and had successful exhibitions of his Japanese paintings in New York City and London, where he became friends with James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde.
He visited Hawaii and Samoa in 1901 to 1902 and established a home in San Francisco about 1906. He visited Hawaii for a second time in 1910 to 1911. He was married in 1910, in San Francisco to Carolyn Bauer. For the remainder of his career, Wores painted the coast on the western edge of San Francisco. He died from a heart attack in San Francisco on September 11, 1939.
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