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Discovering Alhambra's Artist Alley
Alhambra was home to a vibrant arts community in the 1920s and 30s. This colony of artists—which was located on present-day Champion Place and was known as Artists’ Alley—was started by Victor Clyde Forsythe, Frank Tenney Johnson, and Jack Wilkinson Smith. Recognized for their panoramic paintings of the West, Forsythe, Johnson, and Smith were vital in establishing an Alhambra art colony that attracted some of the most famous Western artists and personalities of the time.
One of the most famous American artists with a connection to Artists’ Alley was illustrator Norman Rockwell, known for his humorous and poignant portrayals of Americana.
Rockwell arrived in Alhambra in early 1930. Here, he discovered a group of like-minded people and met his second wife, Mary Barstow, a teacher whose family lived on the north end of Champion Place. After a lightning-quick courtship, Norman and Mary were married. The newlyweds promptly moved back east but would visit Alhambra from time to time.
Rockwell often used local models in his art. Eli Harvey, a sculptor friend and resident of Alhambra’s Artist’s Alley, and Libby Beam, a young local, were Rockwell's models for “Doctor and Doll,” a painting featured in an ad campaign for Michigan-based pharmaceutical manufacturing firm Upjohn Company. He also used his son’s nanny, Alhambra’s Dorothy Seymour, as a model for several pieces, including a 1935 Saturday Evening Post cover entitled “First Day of School.”
To learn more about Alhambra’s Artists’ Alley and the artists who called Alhambra home a century ago, visit the Alhambra Historical Society Museum. Online, visit alhambrahistoricalsociety.org.
