Autry National Center

Capturing California’s Romantic Past:
The Watercolor Works of Eva Scott Fenyes

FEN.103 The Yorba-Slaughter Adobe, San Bernardino County, September 10, 1903

The Braun Research Library Collection houses more than three hundred watercolors of California adobes and California missions created by Eva Scott Fenyes. These works date from 1898 to a week before Mrs. Fenyes’s death in 1930. Many of these adobes are no longer standing; in the case of some historic buildings, a Fenyes painting is the only image that still exists.

BIOGRAPHY

Eva Scott Fenyes was born on November 9, 1849, the daughter of wealthy New York publisher Leonard Scott and his wife, Rebecca Briggs Scott. Eva was educated at Pelham Priory in Pelham Manor, New York, and then studied art in New York, Europe, and Egypt. In 1877 she also spent time in Fort Marion, Florida, where she asked Henry Pratt to have the artists Howling Wolf (Cheyenne) and Zo Tom (Kiowa) create ledger books for her. This early affiliation with Native American artists and her support for their work continued throughout her life.

Mrs. Leonora Curtin, Mrs. Eva Scott Fenyes, and Miss Leonora Curtin, early 1900s.

In 1878 Eva married Lt. William S. Muse (who went on to become a brigadier general). Their only daughter, Leonora, was born in 1879. After spending several years as an army wife, Eva began to spend time traveling, painting, and living in Santa Fe. In 1891 she divorced Muse and traveled extensively in Europe, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern countries. During these travels she met Dr. Adelbert Fenyes, who was a Hungarian nobleman, a doctor of nervous diseases, and an entomologist. They were married in Budapest in 1896 and settled soon thereafter in Pasadena, where Mrs. Fenyes continued to paint.

FEN.1 Entry Facade of the Mission of San Diego de Alcala, San Diego, April 17, 1907

Although Mrs. Fenyes painted constantly, she did not exhibit her work or consider herself a “professional artist.” She painted a variety of subjects and was also interested in music, archaeology, philanthropy, and history. She was an active member in many organizations, including the Pasadena Music and Art Association, Landmarks Club of California, and the Southwest Society, later serving on the board of trustees of the Southwest Museum. Her daughter, Leonora Curtin, and her granddaughter, Leonora Curtin Paloheimo, continued to serve on the board through the late 1980s. Mrs. Fenyes was instrumental in the creation of art/literary salons that brought together a wide variety of local artists, writers, and other intellectuals who met in her home in Pasadena. Among the participants in these salons were such well-known California painters as William Keith and Benjamin Brown, who described her as “too accomplished in many phases of art to become proficient in one.”

In my efforts to determine when Mrs. Fenyes met Charles F. Lummis, I found a letter that Adolph Bandelier wrote in response to an inquiry by Mrs. Fenyes and which probably dates between 1896 and 1898: “You ask me about Lummis. I know him INTIMATELY—perhaps better than anybody else knows him. He came with me to South America, and returned when Mr. Villard had to give me up. Lummis is a very good man and very talented as you easily glean from his writings. He has noble inspirations and fine instincts; only, bent upon the sensational and the striking, this inclination sometimes runs away with him and causes him to lose sight of the nearer duties. Honest as the day is long, sincere and impulsive; he is brave and true friend, only overanxious often to catch the startling and the glistening, almost at any cost. But he is getting calmer, and I have great hopes to see him yet in a very prominent literary position, for his is the metal [sic] for doing good and even great things. In personal appearance he is not select, but then his manners are decent and he would never knowingly do an improper, still less a wrong, thing. —I am sure you would, make [sic] allowances for his oddities, enjoy meeting him.” (Fenyes File from the Bandelier Collection at the Museum of New Mexico History Library, Santa Fe, NM). In addition, Lummis has a note in his 1899 diary about the Fenyeses attending a dinner at his home.

FEN.107 The Carrasco Adobe at 721 Castelar Street, Los Angeles, April 18, 1916

In a letter from 1904 Mrs. Fenyes asked Lummis his opinion about documenting the historic adobes, which she had started in 1898. Lummis’s response to her question on February 10 (found in a letter in the Fenyes Archives Pasadena Museum of History) was, “It seems to me it would be a very valuable thing if you could carry out your plan to make accurate watercolor studies of the old buildings in this region. Accuracy is the first requirement; and such a series would have serious historical value. I hope you may be able to realize this plan—and I am inclined to think that if you can undertake it in just the right way, you will find it better for your health than all the doctors. . . .” They continued their lifelong contact. In Mrs. Fenyes’s correspondence with Lummis, she often asked him for recommendations for books and/or places to stay when she was going to a place she knew he had been but with which she was unfamiliar. Although Mrs. Fenyes made a promised gift of her paintings to the Southwest Museum in 1905, her lawyer advised her to wait until the museum was incorporated, which she did.