Lyla Vivian Marshall Harcoff
The Sale of Her First Paintings as a Professional Artist
By Frank Goss
About ten years ago, I sat in the living room of the home of Jane Martindale, daughter of the California painter Lyla Harcoff (1883-1956). At the time Jane was in her late 70’s and in good physical health. Her senior years had not dimmed a sharp mind. Her home was certainly a bohemian creation. It was designed by the great architect Maria Lutah Riggs, the designer who inherited George Washington Smith’s architectural practice. Over the entry door of the home is a bold sign, “Adios Los Caballos” (Goodbye Horses). Jane said that, at the request of her mother, Riggs had taken an old horse stables and modified it to be used as a home and studio for the artist.
I asked Jane about one of her mother’s paintings on the wall. It was a painting of a young Native American boy wrapped in a blue blanket. The painting was dated 1913. She recounted the following tale of her mother’s life.
Lyla Vivian Marshall, born outside of Lafayette, Indiana, had wanted to be an artist from her earliest years. After high school, she studied at Purdue University and graduated with a degree in Art in 1904. She was one of eight women in a class of 218. She went on for postgraduate work at the Art Institute of Chicago. Subsequently, she made three study trips to Paris and attended Academie Moderne for a year. By 1912 she would have had the equivalent of a PhD. in art.
Finished with her studies, she set out to find professional employment as an art teacher. Though talented, warm and beautiful, she could not find a job teaching art, even thought she had unquestionably good credentials. The best she could do was to take a position at the famous Chicago retailer, Marshall Fields, as a painter of delicate porcelains. She worked a year to earn her two weeks of vacation and booked a trip on the Sante Fe Railroad to go west at the beginning of the Summer of ‘13.
For reasons unknown to anyone today, she got off the train at the platform in Winslow, Arizona. At the time, Winslow was composed of a couple of storage buildings and an uncovered loading platform for the train. The freight porters off-loaded a supply of food and clothing arranged by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the Hopi tribe members on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Mesas. Lyla, traveling by herself, chose to accompany the pack train led by Native Americans as it took supplies north to the isolated Mesas.
She ended up in a village called Mishongnovi on the Second Mesa. She had brought with her six canvases and instead of speeding through them over her two-week vacation, she took her time and spent the entire Summer of ’13 living with the tribe in and making six wonderful paintings. She was a petite woman, standing only five foot tall. Reports had it that she was the first and only white woman to have “summered” with the tribe. Even then this would have been an honor for her to have lived on the Mesa and observed many sacred traditions.
At the end of the summer of ’13 she sensed the change of seasons and accompanied a small pack train back to Winslow. As evening settled, she waited alone on the platform as a storm arrived and snow began to fall on her and her bags and her six stretched and finished canvases – the treasures of her summer. Finally the train arrived on its way heading west to Los Angeles. She boarded with her belongings. The conductor asked for her ticket and she presented the “return” stub, which entitled her to ride to Los Angeles and then turn around and head back to Chicago.
The conductor told her that she was welcome to take her seat but she would have to purchase a second ticket to take the six paintings with her. She did not have the money to purchase another ticket and after a brief argument she was escorted off the train with her bags and her paintings. The train continued on and a blizzard ensued.
The next morning, the same train with the same conductor arrived at the station and the conductor saw that 3 feet of snow had fallen during the night. He immediately knew that his penurious nature might have caused the death of this little woman.
He looked over the empty, snow-laden platform and saw a few canvases arranged as a tent, nearly covered with snowdrift. Fearing that he would find a frozen artist, he trudged over to the makeshift tent and opened it, only to find Lyla tightly wrapped in all her belongings, no worse for the wear, protected by her canvases.
Though staggered at her ability to survive the night, the conductor still would not allow her to board with her paintings. Another argument ensued and this time a well-dressed traveler stepped off the train to ask what the problem was. As life would have it, the gentleman was Edward P. Ripley, the legendary CEO of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. He asked Harcoff to see the paintings and agreed to buy two of them on the spot. He also convinced his thrifty conductor to allow Harcoff to return to Chicago with her four remaining canvases.
This is the story of Harcoff’s first sale and the beginning of her career as a professional artist. Ripley was a legendry collector. He is also the one credited for rescuing the bankrupt AT&SF Railroad. Part of his philosophy was to get artists to use the railroad to travel west in exchange for the use of their images and paintings to promote westward travel.
I would have thought that all this was apocryphal – just good story. However, Jane, the artist’s daughter, went over to a drawer and pulled out her mother’s scrapbook and showed me the newspaper clipping from her 1913 hometown newspapers that chronicled the entire story, as I have laid it forth here.
In Jane’s home there turned out to be two paintings remaining from this event: one, of the Hopi Boy, called “Young Man in Arizona;” the other, titled “Hopi Village.” The second painting is much smaller than the portrait of the boy. It is a view of one section of the cliff dwelling village of Mishongnovi which is in the private collection of Sullivan Goss. When each of these paintings is completely examined, it can be noted that both of them have “tide” marks evident on the canvas verso, showing that, at one time, they were nearly entirely “soaked” – perhaps in the melting snow if an autumn storm in 1913. Both paintingsare very compelling.
The incident allows us to draw some conclusions about the independent nature of this artist. She was a farm girl who insisted on a formal education when the ordinary course of life at the time would have taught her sewing and cooking. She graduated from an agricultural and engineering school with a degree in art, a degree that Purdue did not offer at the time. (This was verified by Sullivan Goss who contacted the Purdue registrar who stated that the school never offered art degrees, for man or woman, in those years. But after checking with the Purdue library, the registrar reported back that Lyla Marshall was shown in the yearbook receiving a Bachelor of Art degree in Fine Art – thereby puzzling everyone.) With unparalleled credentials she was rebuffed in her search for a teaching job. Undaunted she found a job as a professional artist, albeit painting porcelain plates. Without the aid of a traveling companion, in an era when she must have been something of an anomaly, she took a holiday train ride and ended up the only white woman, a two days horse ride from the Winslow Arizona train depot. Alone, with the members of the Hopi tribe, she completes six extraordinary canvases and fights her way back home to start her career as a painter in Chicago. I can only guess that calling this 5-foot woman “tiny’ would have been a mistake.
Sullivan Goss has once again been named Santa Barbara’s favorite art gallery by the readers of the Independent. We’d like to thank all of our wonderful patrons for voting for us and for your continuing support. It has been a very big year for Sullivan Goss as we launched our groundbreaking SGTV program, hosted the Public Square art project, organized Art Helps to assist needy families in this tough economic time, and opened the Arts and Letters Cafe for dinner service the first time in many years.
