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century ago, Reno had around 12,000 residents, about 5 percent of its current population. But it did have an art scene. “There were definitely people painting in Reno, and there had been for a long time,” said art appraiser Jack Bacon. He used to own Jack Bacon & Co, a gallery and framing shop on South Virginia Street, where the restaurant Feast is now. In 1916, a landscape painter and teacher from San Francisco named Lorenzo Latimer showed up on the scene and made marks that last till this day.
From the redwood Forests …
A local painting club that started in 1921 is still going strong
Some of the members of the Latimer Art Club—“Lady” Jill Mueller, Jean Hare, club president Eileen Fuller, Howard Freidman, Maurice Hershberger, Vicki Curwen and Ronnie Rector—gathered for a reception for thier current exhibit at Sparks Heritage Museum. PHOTO/KRIS VAGNER
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Latimer was big in San Francisco in the 1890s, known especially for painting outdoors. “As a painter constantly studying nature firsthand, Latimer demonstrated a versatility sometimes lacking in works by artists who painted mostly in their studios,” wrote Alfred C. Harrison Jr., in a 2005 monograph published by his North Point Gallery in Berkeley. Latimer was also noted for his outlook on nature—a balance of reverence and familiarity that still defines much of California and Nevada landscape art—and his knack for accurately depicting redwood trees. By all accounts he was a well-liked teacher, and he often brought students outside to paint with him.
Eventually, his influence spread across the state line. In 1914 he forayed to a resort at Fallen Leaf Lake, near Lake Tahoe, which led to a regular practice of painting on location in the Sierras. In 1916, according to Harrison’s book, two budding painters from Reno, Dora Groesbeck and Nevada Wilson Reilly, persuaded him teach a class here. “Almost every year for the rest of his life, Latimer would teach in Reno, usually in the early autumn,” Harrison wrote. “It is entirely different, both very fine and a good change,” Latimer wrote to a friend about Nevada. He painted views of local landmarks such as Peavine Peak, rendering the complexity of sagebrush and desert peach with as much attention as he’d paid to the redwoods. In 1921, his Reno students formed the Latimer Art Club. “He would mail a painting to the club,” said Eileen Fuller, who joined in 2003 when she retired from banking and is now the club’s president. “They would have homework—to try to copy it.” In 1931, the club joined a couple of other entities in an effort to start the Nevada Art Gallery, which would later become the Nevada Museum of Art. In the 1960s, the club and the museum parted ways. There are a few different versions of the story on record, but it’s clear that the club continued to value its traditional approach to painting, and the museum wanted to become more cosmopolitan. Fuller put it this way: “I think in the ’60s there was a big fallout between the museum and the club. They didn’t want the local yokels running the [place] anymore.”
