page_title: Alice Brown Chittenden
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Alice Brown Chittenden / Career
caption_attribution_description: Phelan Building
context_page_description: Alice Brown Chittenden was an American painter based in San Francisco, California who specialized in flowers, portraits, and landscapes. Her life's work was a collection of botanicals depicting California wildflowers, for which she is renowned and received gold and silver medals at expositions. She taught at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art from 1897 to 1941.
context_section_description: She painted throughout her life. Although she did travel to the East Coast of the United States, Italy and France to study and exhibit during her life, her career was rooted in San Francisco where she was considered the "Grand Dame" of Nineteenth Century San Francisco women artists, who was said to have "evinces a powerful genius" through the "magic of her brush."
  She created many paintings of flowers, especially roses, chrysanthemums, and peonies. Her life's work was a series of more than 256 botanical paintings of 350 varieties of California wildflowers executed over a period of 50 years. Chittenden was named the leading flower painter of America in Kate Field's Washington newspaper in March 1895. She gathered many specimens herself locally in the San Francisco Bay Area but also during long trips via horseback and stagecoach to the Sierra Nevada Mountains or the deserts of Southern California. These studies were painted using oils on paper. She received assistance from her friend Alice Eastwood, who was the curator of botany at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
  Her works were so precise that they added not only to art, but also to the field of science.
  From the love of wildflowers, she undertook to paint the native wild flowers of the State, and so good was her success that she went in for more ambitious work and has painted some wonderful roses, peonies, pelargoniums and other flowers that have been awarded highest prizes whenever exhibited.
  — What Our Artists will sent to Chicago article
  She also painted many portraits, often with pastels. She made portraits of James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill (1914) in the collection of the State Museum Resource Center, California State Parks; Robert Gordon Sproul, President of the University of California; and Judge John H. Boalt who donated funds to build the first Boalt Hall which houses the University of California School of Law at UC Berkeley. She also painted many landscapes.
  In the 1880s she had a studio in San Francisco on the fourth floor of the Phelan Building. Chittenden exhibited two paintings (one of chrysanthemums and another of roses) at the  California
  State Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. In 1885 the San Francisco Art Association held an all-women's exhibition, thought to be the first major exhibition of that type in the United States, that included Chittenden's works. She exhibited at the all-male Bohemian Club Winter Picture Show in 1895, although not a member of the club she was uncommonly invited to attend the show.
  She taught art beginning in 1897 at the Hopkins Art School (later the California School of Design) at California University and in 1902 lectured at the Brooklyn Institute on "Wild Flowers of California". In 1907 through at least 1918 Chittenden was an Assistant Professor of Drawing at the California School of Design.
  Chittenden was the first woman to be a juror of the San Francisco Art Association exhibitions. In 1906, she helped organize the Women's Sketch Club. She exhibited at National Academy of Design in New York and in 1908 at the Salon of Société des Artistes Français in Paris.
  In 1941 she retired from her teaching position at the California School of Fine Arts and was made a lifetime member of the San Francisco Art Association for her distinguished career.
  Alice Brown Chittenden died on October 13, 1944 in San Francisco and funeral services were held in the city at the N. Gray and Company funeral home.
  In 1965, 261 oil paintings of wildflowers were exhibited at the California Historical Society. The studies had been in storage at the California Academy of Sciences. A limited publication of 1,000 copies of four of her wildflower paintings was printed and issued in 1968 by Lawton and Alfred Kennedy. From the Elizabeth Hay Bechtel Collection at the University of California, Berkeley, the paintings included Chamomile, Mayweed; Thimbleberry; Fairy Lantern, Globe Lily; and Common Evening Primrose. An exhibit entitled "California Native Trees" was held in 1992 at the Helen Crocker Russell 
caption: Phelan Building, San Francisco, where Chittenden had a studio in the 1880s.
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