The Stevenson House Monterey, California
This deceptively modest white adobe house in Monterey California welcomed a most distinguished visitor in autumn 1879: legendary author Robert Louis Stevenson. He had been traveling west and suffering from ill health. But his journey had an important goal---that of romance, specifically love for his future wife Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne. At the time of Stevenson’s sojourn, the house served as a boarding house called the French Hotel. Over the ensuing decades, it fell into disrepair, but in the late 1930s, two local Monterey residents devoted their private funds to save it, and eventually the two-story white adobe became the property of the Monterey State Historic Park, where today it welcomes visitors worldwide.
Stevenson’s meditative walks along the Monterey shoreline were rumored to have inspired his popular novel Treasure Island. Whether fact or fiction, another gifted individual resolutely found inspiration in the picturesque seaside village—artist Edward Joseph Finley Timmons. In the 1940s he set up a studio in neighboring Carmel-by-the Sea in what was the first apartment building in Carmel, the Sundial Court apartments.
In his painting of the Stevenson House, the setting appears bucolic, and the style features loose brushwork. Sunlight bathes the architecture and landscape. He rendered the low trees in an impressionistic manner, lavishing attention and detail on the subject of his landscape—the historic edifice that gave respite to one of the most celebrated authors of all time.
Though his parents initially wished their son would pursue his athletic abilities (he held the state record in the mile), Timmons boldly rejected an athletic scholarship at the University of Wisconsin and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His passion to become an artist was deeply ingrained from childhood. When he asked his parents for art lessons, they tried to assuage his desires with piano lessons! However, his music teacher gave him art instruction on the side, and even went as far as persuading his parents to give the young Timmons money for a three-month course at the Chicago Art Institute. When his funds ran out, everyone expected Timmons to return home to Janesville, Wisconsin. Relentless in his ambition, he remained in Chicago and swept floors to earn money for classes with John Vanderpool who would teach him anatomy. During his last year of study, he impressed the faculty to the degree that he was hired to teach a sketching class. He graduated with high honors in 1903, and from 1906-1918 held the post of sketching instructor. Receiving a travel scholarship in 1908, he journeyed to Europe and studied the Old Masters for a brief time. Chicago and later Evanston Illinois became his home for most of his adult life, though he traveled to California on several occasions, where his brother-in-law, a distinguished painter in his own right, Arthur Hill Gilbert, lived. This painting and another in the collection by Timmons, Portrait of Marjorie, were donations by the artist’s widow in 1966.
