Peinture

1945 · 63891 — San Francisco CA: Carl Frederick Hobby 1211 Jackson Street ca. 1945. One large oil painting on canvas sized 13 x 18 in. preserved as original stretched canvas within the frame as presented to the artist’s niece and with the original green & gilt frame now professionally cleaned and w/ artist’s business card mounted on verso of frame along with numbering & size. Signed in lower corner this painting was presented by the artist following the War to his niece and held in the family until 2025. This original oil painting depicts a young Chinese-American mother and child buying an orange with fruit crates stacked beside in front of the mirror and pedestrian walking by as well as the advertising signage in the doorway in Chinese painted by Hobby. The sign reads 油糖èœèˆ– You tang chai pu — oil and sugar vegetable shop and produce in the crates below the window in the foreground appear to be cabbages oranges and possibly mangoes. Hobby wrote in his 1936 illustrated book “Chinatown San Francisco†that there were a variety of vegetable and produce “Chinese Food Shops†situated from Washington to Jackson Street selling blue-green melons mustard greens water chestnuts and more.Hobby 1886-1964 was the son of an Iowa City IA ophthalmologist and moved with the family as a teenager to San Diego CA about 1900 where he began working at 14 as a sketch artist and later published a book in San Diego in 1919 with his artwork. He studied art at the Cumming School of Art in Des Moines the Art Students League in New York and became portrait and landscape painter in San Diego until 1923. After a divorce from Plooma Crowther he settled in San Francisco in Chinatown where he became an instructor at the Art Center while also painting and sketching the densely populated area publishing “The Street of Dragon Lanterns Chinatown of San Francisco†in 1936 while contracting with the Madison & Burke Agency through World War II. Exhibits of his paintings and pen & ink sketches were displayed at the Oakland Art Gallery in 1928 and the Society for Sanity in Art in 1945. See: Maud McB. Maywood Palm City The Chula Vista Star July 9 1937 p. 6; Sketches of San Diego 1919. Carl Frederick Hobby, 1211 Jackson Street, unknown