Note
Jack Wilkinson Smith
(b.1873, New Jersey - d. 1949, Monterey Park, CA)
MOUNTAIN GLACIER
1922, Oil on canvas, 46 x 50 inches
Jonathan Club collection
Jack Wilkinson Smith is known as one of the finest masters of early California Impressionist painting. Smith attended the Art Institute of Chicago, and in his early career turned to commercial art jobs to earn his living. He painted signs and theater scenes in Chicago and Lexington, Kentucky, and worked as a staff illustrator on the Cincinnati Enquirer. His frontline sketches of the Spanish-American War in 1898 brought him national acclaim.
In 1906, lured by Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce promotions, Smith visited California to see the West whose scenes he had been painting from imagination. In California Smith turned to oil painting, and after 1912 traveled widely throughout the state.
For many years he maintained a studio in Alhambra in an area called "Artist's Alley," where several top artists of Western subject mattter lived. After World War I, when local practitioners of modernist styles such as Post-Impressionism began challenging conservatives, he organized the Biltmore Salon in 1923, a non-profit to exhibit and sell top-level artists who painted traditional Western scenes.
In 1926 Smith became the Jonathan Club’s first Life Member Artist, granted in trade for art to fill the empty walls of its new building at 545 South Figueroa Street. One of his best known subjects is of Laguna Beach.