Humboldt Historian

“This work by C. T. Wilson was painted in 1911 for a local family, with whose heirs it still resides here in Humboldt. The redwood forests have always held a unique fas­cination for people. In the days before color photog­raphy, people looked to landscape painters for life-like representations of nature’s glories. Other artists paint­ed California’s redwoods, but Wilson’s works were the most broadly known, not only for their size-his largest painting was ninety-eight feet in length-but because the artist was skilled at marketing. Wilson’s paintings of redwoods were featured on calendars nationwide, and displayed at Expositions in San Francisco and Chicago. Born in San Francisco in 1885 to Agnes E. Wilson, considered California’s earliest known woman painter, Wilson spent about fifteen years in Humboldt, between 1900 and 1916, painting mostly redwood scenes. Many local peiople may know of Wilson from his large-scale forest paintings which hang in Eureka at the county li­brary, courthouse, and city hall. The Wilson painting shown here is unusual in that it is small-just nineteen-and-a-half inches tall by eleven­and-a-half inches wide. Cropped for the front cover, ”