ESTHER ANNA HUNT (1875 - 1951)
Artist
Images
Born in
Grand Island, Nebraska, Esther Hunt became a painter
focused on Oriental themes, especially portraits and
figures she did from models that she found in
Chinatown in San Francisco.
She spent some of her early childhood in Columbus,
Nebraska. Her father, Stephen Barton, died when she
was four years old in 1879, and two years later her
mother remarried, and the family went to California.
Her stepfather was Captain John A. Frazier, and he
took his wife and her children to San Diego County
where he acquired 700 acres of land and established
the town of Carlsbad. In 1893, the family moved to
Los Angeles, and from 1896 to 1900, Esther Hunt was
listed in the City Directory as an artist.
In 1901 she enrolled at the Mark Hopkins Institute
in San Francisco, and financed her education with
paintings of Chinatown child genre figures and
portraits. They became popular and widely circulated
when she perfected a color process to make
reproductions, which featured the colorful costumes
of the children. A marketing agent sold them in the
East.
Making money, she traveled to New York City and
enrolled in the Art Students League from 1903 to
1905 and studied with William Merritt Chase in New
York and in Paris for six years. In Paris she
studied portraiture. During her career when she had
returned from Europe, she had studios in Los Angeles
from 1913-1918, San Francisco from 1918 to 1926,
Greenwich Village in New York from 1927 to 1931, San
Francisco from 1932 to 1945, and Santa Ana until her
death in 1951.
When she returned to Los Angeles in 1913, she again
took up her interest in Chinese subjects and made
many painting trips to San Francisco. Settling there
in 1918, she devoted most of her attention to
Oriental subjects and had a nation-wide market for
her paintings, prints, postcards, and colored
ceramic figurines. She also did portraits of
children in France, beach scenes at Laguna and
Native American women and children from the Pomo of
northern California.
Exhibitions included the San Francisco Art
Association, Panama-California Exposition and the
Paris Salon.
Sources include:
Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick, An
Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West,
p. 154
Paul Sternberg, Art by American Women
