Chris Jorgensen

Paintings in Inventory (Click on an image for a larger view)

Chris Jorgensen (1860-1935) was born in Norway and emigrated in 1870 to San Francisco at age ten with his widowed mother. As a teenager, Jorgensen started to make plein air watercolor sketches of local scenery, and these came to the attention of Virgil Williams, the Director of the School of Design. Impressed by Jorgensen’s talent, Williams arranged a scholarship for the boy, who did so well as a student that he was hired as an instructor upon completion of his course of study. Through this circumstance he met Angela Ghirardelli, daughter of the chocolate manufacturer. Their marriage in 1888 solved Jorgensen’s financial problems, allowing the artist to follow his own genius unencumbered by the ne­cessity of making a living. From the beginning of his career as an exhibiting artist in the 1880s, Jorgensen chose watercolor as his favored medium. Sketching outdoors in watercolor allowed him to capture the lineaments of his subject in one sitting. Jorgensen was always a scrupulous realist, who had “the faculty of seeing poetry in everything” to quote a favorable review of his works that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in April 1885.