E. Charlton Fortune

Hatton Ranch, 1920, Monterey Museum of Art

Although the turn of the 20^th century was an era of expanding opportunities for women, Euphemia (she preferred Effie) Charlton Fortune was neither the first nor the last woman artist to disguise her gender.  Her style, which moved from Impressionist softness to a harder-edged, geometric style highlighting the bright colors of California, was naturally praised as “masculine;” early reviewers of her work may not have been aware that they were writing about a woman. (An award at the Paris Salon of 1924 went to Monsieur Fortune). Fortune avoided interiors, women and children, the more typical subjects of painters like Mary Cassatt, preferring the countryside and fishing villages around her adopted home of Monterey. Fortune understood modernist principles of composition, and created movement in sun-soaked landscape works like Hatton Ranch of 1920. Fortune may have been familiar with European art tendencies, but Hatton Ranch is a pure California image.

Fortune was born in Sausalito in 1885, her father a Scot and her mother a native San Franciscan. The family was wealthy, and throughout her life, Fortune was able to travel. By 1905 she was studying with Arthur Frank Mathews at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art (the first incarnation of SFAI). The family home was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake—dynamited to prevent the fire spreading—and with it, all Fortune’s early paintings. The family relocated to New York;  study at the Art Students’ League and travel in Paris exposed her to Cubism and Futurism, but by 1912 she had set up a studio overlooking the ocean in Monterey. Here she flourished; she had seven works exhibited at San Francisco’s Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915, winning a silver medal, as she did at San Diego’s Panama-California Exhibition the same year. 

Fortune travelled extensively, but always returned to Monterey, where she was active in the art community that had grown up after the 1906 earthquake. In her forties, Fortune made a radical shift in subject if not in style. Dissatisfied with the fussy, Victorian bric-a-brac of Catholic churches, she formed the Monterey Guild— a unique effort to renew liturgical art and revive the system of medieval guilds. The Guild produced Fortune’s designs for everything from vestments to altars. Their work can be found in over 70 cathedrals and churches nationally and internationally, and can be found locally at the Carmel Mission, St. Angela’s Church and at Mission San Juan Bautista, as well as in many churches throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.