Browse > Annie L. Harmon

Annie L. Harmon

Paintings in Inventory

Click on an image for a larger view. 

Artist's Biography

Annie Harmon was the sister of Edward Harmon, who was married to Tennie Keith, William Keith’s daughter. Through this connection, she became Keith’s student and launched into a career as an exhibiting artist, making her debut at the Spring Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association in 1885. Later the same year, she participated in the landmark “Ladies’ Art Exhibition” where her “several neat sketches” earned a favorable mention in the San Francisco Examiner (Dec. 16, 1885). Harmon sent small-scale landscapes to the Art Association exhibitions most years until 1913. Her works show the influence of the Barbizon aesthetic, embraced by William Keith in his later career, featuring broad open foregrounds, informal compositions, and muted color schemes. Our painting is an outdoor study of a picturesque cabin at El Dorado, a tiny settlement near Placerville where Annie Harmon visited in 1906. Rural cabins sometimes were built around ancient trees. The most famous dwelling of this kind was the “Big Tree Room” at Yosemite’s Hutchings Hotel where a huge trunk pierced through the hotel’s roof. Late nineteenth-century nature worship regarded cities as dens of iniquity and unspoiled nature an antidote to what John Muir called the “choke-damp” [suffocation] of urban life.