Jessie Arms Botke

(1883-1971)

Decoration 40 x 50 1/2in framed 48 x 58in

Footnotes

Provenance
Stendahl Galleries, Los Angeles, California, 1931.
Gilbert Auction, New York, 1983.
The collection of James and Linda Ries, Beverly Hills, California.
Private collection, Southern California.

Exhibited
Los Angeles, Bullock's, California Artist's Fiesta, September 1 - 15, 1931, listed as No. 27. A copy of the exhibition catalog accompanies the lot.
Los Angeles, Stendahl Galleries, Jessie Arms Botke, January 5 - 31, 1931, sold for $1,200.
Ventura, Ventura County Historical Museum, Paintings by Jessie Arms Botke 1883-1971, December 7, 1984 - January 13, 1985.
Carmel, Carmel Art Association, Botke-McComas-Seideneck: Works by three artist couples - Jessie Arms and Cornelis Botke; Gene Frances and Francis McComas; Catherine and George Seideneck, August 4 - September 6, 1988, no. 2.
Oakland, The Oakland Museum, A Time and Place: From the Ries Collection of California Painting, December 1 - March 3, 1991.
Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, A Time and a Place: From the Ries Collection of California Painting, April 25 - July 7, 1991.
West Palm Beach, Norton Gallery and School or Art, A Time and a Place, From the Ries Collection of California Painting, November 9, 1991 - January 5, 1992.

Literature
Ventura Star-Free Press, December 11, 1984, section B, p. 1.
Ventura County Historical Museum, Jessie Arms Botke 1883-1971, 1985.
Carmel Art Association, Botke-McComas-Seideneck: Works by three artist couples - Jessie Arms and Cornelis Botke; Gene Frances and Francis McComas; Catherine and George Seideneck, Carmel, 1988, pl. 2, illustrated.
William A. Karges Fine Art, Birds, Boughs & Blossoms, Jessie Arms Botke (1883-1971), Carmel, p. 34, plate 25, illustrated.
Harvey L. Jones and Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, A Time and a Place, From the Ries Collection of California Painting, Oakland, 1990, pp. 98-99, illustrated.

Noted California woman artist Jessie Arms Botke is celebrated for her highly decorated and stylized depictions of birds, particularly peacocks and cockatoos. Botke grew up in Chicago and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She spent time in Europe before moving to New York in 1911. There she began to develop what would become her signature style while working as a designer of tapestry cartoons for Albert Herter of Herter Looms. A Herter Looms mural commission for the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco that featured decorative borders of birds, fruit and flowers was the artist's first notable experience with birds as a subject.

In 1918, Botke and her artist-husband Cornelis Botke, first visited California together. After extended time in Europe in the early 1920s, the couple settled permanently in Wheeler Canyon near Santa Paula in 1927. In Southern California, Botke fully developed her bird-focused work, using both domestic and exotic birds as her central subjects, typically presented in a stylized and complex flora-filled compositions such as the present work, Decoration. Artistic influences came from 19th Century British illustrations, Edo period Japanese folding screens, and 16th Century Flemish still life painters who presented still life in "pure decoration" rather than in grotesque compositions referencing death and the passage of time. ¹

"Decoration is not only large in size but, with its multiplicity of blooms and birds as well as the elaborate background landscape, highly complex...The bouquet in Decoration is bounteous and contains the wide variety of flowers which the most flamboyant and technically skilled European still-life painters liked to paint to show off. Except for Rembrandt tulips (the striped flowers), all the blooms could have been cultivated in southern California: roses, peonies, hollyhocks, jasmine, morning glories, watsonia, Dutch Iris, as well as the flowering tree branch." ²

In Decoration, a male peacock is seated at center in an erect, haughty pose. His closed yet resplendent plume is painted in rich jewel tones and cascades from the center to the lower left corner. A pair of white cockatoos are positioned on either side of the peacock balancing the composition. One cockatoo is seated in profile and the other has seemingly just alighted onto a flowering tree branch, his still spread wings adding movement to the otherwise serene scene. The birds are presented on and before an enormous bulbous footed vessel bursting with a variety of local and European blossoms. A line of spruce along the left edge adds depth to the scene, and the sky, with its lively brushwork but limited green-yellow tones, serves as a luminescent backdrop that does not compete with the dramatic foreground display.

¹ Harvey L. Jones and Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, A Time and a Place, From the Ries Collection of California Painting, Oakland, 1990, p. 98.
² Jones, p. 98.