| Notes |
- U.S., Consular Registration Certificates, 1907 - 1918 <http://www.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2995&enc=1>
about John M Trullinger
Name: John M Trullinger
Birth Date: 29 Apr 1870
Birth Place: Forest Grove, Oregon
Spouse: Saidee G Trullinger
Residence: 8 ave Campagne Province, Paris, France
Civil Date: 30 Dec 1908
arrived in France Mar 1894 for the purpose of studying art
I called and spoke with Liisa who is the archivist at Clatsop Historical Society in Astoria, WA. She is a very nice gal and was very helpful. She actually lives in the same house that Sherman Grant Trullinger once lived in. She did a brief genealogy on Sherman Grant Trullinger which she is photocopying for me. She is also sending me a copy of the 'Legacy of John Henry Trullinger', a publication about the life and impressionist artwork of his. The cost is $9.95. She said they have all kinds of other historical data and artifacts of the Trullinger family. I told her I would make sure to stop in and see all of it the next time I was in Astoria. She also said she would be happy to show me her home as well. Her work email address is Liisap@cumtux.org.
(David H. Drollinger 3 Feb 2012)
Was an impressionist painter who travelled abroad. His lover of 40 years was Edna Goodhue. Info by Jill Alexander. Artists of the American West, a biographical dictionary, vol III by Doris Ostrander Dawdy.
Ref the record of Raymond Lewis Trullinger (John's nephew) for more information about John in a memoir of Raymond written by Raymond's wife, Florence Wildman-Trullinger.
Louise Bryant's 1913 portrait shows the calm before the storm.
Inside two years she would scandalize Portland society by running off with firebrand reporter John Reed, first to New York, where she flirted with playwright Eugene O'Neill, then to Russia, where she and Reed covered the revolution.
In John Henry Trullinger's oil painting, Bryant leans back on the arm of a gilded chair, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a pale, empire-waist dress. Her gaze is direct and challenging; one hand rests on a walking stick.
It's as if she's saying, "OK, try and find me."
A black-and-white photograph of the painting exists at the Oregon History Center as OHS negative No. 13358, but nobody has seen the portrait itself since the 1920s, says Janet Kreft, a Portland lawyer who's been hunting it for years - even going as far as Ireland.
Bryant's portrait is the most significant "lost" painting by Trullinger, an Oregon impressionist painter who lived from 1870 to 1960 and studied in Paris at the Academie Julian in the early 1900s. But it's far from the only one. There's no known catalog of his work, which is estimated to amount to as many as 1,000 paintings and sketches. The largest collection to surface numbered about 20 and was itself dispersed.
Trullinger grew up in Astoria in comparative luxury; his family owned the city's electric light company. Indeed, Trullinger underwrote his artistic career by selling his share in 1902, heading for Europe with his wife, Sadie, and young nephew Raymond.
He studied in France until 1910. His numerous paintings of Sadie suggest she became increasingly unhappy as time went on. The two were divorced in Portland in 1912. Trullinger moved in with a Portland woman, Edna Goodhue, in 1916, living with her until her death 41 years later.
Shows few and far between
The Clatsop County Historical Society owns only a dozen or so of Trullinger's paintings. Recent research at the museum turned up period press clippings that mention other paintings (such as "Girl With Powder Puff") unknown to his collectors.
The Astoria museum held the definitive Trullinger show in 1989. In it were 45 paintings, including his best known - "Lady With a Parasol," featuring a critical-looking Sadie - which was shown at a prestigious Paris salon in 1909.
Riding the success of that show, Trullinger returned to Portland a year later. He probably painted Bryant because she was married to his nephew Paul, a wealthy dentist.
Two years later, Louise Bryant ran off with Reed, and the pair covered the 1917 Russian Revolution firsthand. Bryant's book about the experience, "Six Months In Russia," beat Reed's "Ten Days That Shook the World" to press by several months, and she returned to Portland to wow 4,000 fans at a 1919 lecture.
After Reed's death from typhus in Moscow in 1920 and his burial at the Kremlin, Bryant married diplomat William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France, and had a daughter, Anne, in 1923.
It was Anne whom Kreft tracked down in Ireland, armed with a photo of her mother's portrait: Anne had never seen it.
Though she had married a millionaire, Bryant remained determinedly bohemian, and when she hung around with Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in Paris, Bullitt divorced her by mail. She died a penniless alcoholic in 1936.
The portrait of Bryant is the holy grail for collectors.
"That's the one which would bring the big money," says Andrew Hudson, who handled a number of Trullinger paintings when he worked with art dealer Marcella Peterson.
How many are there?
The Bryant picture is only one of the puzzles that surround Trullinger's output, local experts say. For one thing, nobody knows exactly how many paintings he produced in his 90-year life span. Multnomah Village art dealer Yves Le Mettour thinks it could range between 200 and 300, but Sovereign Collection gallery owner Robert Joki suspects the total could be nearer 1,000. "A lot of people are looking for his work, but all for the right reasons," Joki says. "They're not worth a lot of money, and they're scattered all over." Indeed, the most expensive Trullinger painting ever sold - a huge picnic scene - was bought by an Ashland hotel for $20,000, Hudson recalls. Art dealer Bob Fox, who's seen about 50 Trullingers, says the Bay Area may hold a large number. He thinks wealthy Trullinger relatives might have migrated there in their later years. "If I was really looking, I'd put an ad in a San Francisco paper," he says. Trullinger's habit of painting on very coarse - almost burlap - canvas makes longevity an issue as well, Joki says: "They crack like crazy. Whatever the total, I bet 10 percent have been destroyed."
Le Mettour says Trullinger's unique position among Northwest artists rests on his style. Trullinger learned French impressionism but never adapted to American sensibilities when he returned, like the painters of the "plein-air" school, for example. His contemporaries included C.C. McKim, Clyde Leon Keller and Clara Jane Stevens. "American artists who studied in France - and there were many at the turn of the century - came back to Santa Fe, or Laguna Beach, or Old Lyme, Conn., and created their own school," Le Mettour says. "That's when the American art movement came of age. "But Trullinger stayed with the French line of thought. He was a skilled painter, but in Portland he was in a vacuum. And the last thing a rich man in Portland wanted to do in 1900 was to buy a painting by an Oregon artist," Le Mettour says. "It had to be from New York or Europe - that was chic." Trullinger's sole show at the Portland Art Museum, in 1910, was cut short after only 15 days. He was informed that he should come and get his pictures because a showing of New York artists was being mounted early.
No "lurid dauber"
An inveterate correspondent, the artist expressed his frustration in letters to The Oregonian over the years. "Is it possible for a painter to thrive in Oregon on Oregon patronage?" he wondered in a letter to the newspaper soon after his return. About 1,000 words later, after references to lurid pigment and bad taste and a complaint that close inspection of impressionist works inevitably disappointed the unenlightened, he concluded that "a lurid dauber with a designing personality and some social gifts might succeed where the true artist would fail." It would seem that Trullinger set himself up to slide gracefully into an impressionist sunset, and that's pretty much what he did, Le Mettour says, though it took another 50 years. In the interim, Trullinger taught and produced a number of landscapes that are interesting in their depiction of a Portland now gone - his 1937 view of the old St. Vincent's Hospital and Westover Terrace as a leafy cart track, for example. There are also bucolic views of Sauvie Island that could have been done yesterday. Trullinger's portraits are much more vigorous and include a number of prominent social figures, including Oregon governors, judges and their wives, reflecting his lofty social standing (his sister Isabelle was married to Gov. T.T. Geer). He also painted a couple of Works Progress Administration pictures in the 1930s, but his later years produced nothing memorable, experts say. "I think he was a little weak," Le Mettour says, with a sigh. "Some painters express strength through painting; others are good dinner guests. We all need motivation, and he didn't seem to have the drive to paint his heart out. "Trullinger didn't have to worry too much about money - the French would call him a dilettante," Le Mettour says. "He painted in oils and pastels, crayon, pencil sketches, but it's strictly local interest, he's not quite good enough to go further. His French work was much more focused. Who knows what would have happened if he'd stayed there?"
Dirty Madonna
Some of the known pictures pose fascinating questions.
Astoria collector Michael Foster has five Trullingers - two landscapes, the only known Lower Columbia River scene with a large sailing ship, a detail of the Jardins du Luxembourg. He even has Trullinger's paint box, made for him by his inventor father in 1894. And over an elaborate fireplace in his 1890s Victorian home, Foster has a beatific Madonna in a mauve gown, painted in 1906.
"This was so dirty when I got it, I didn't realize she had a halo and there was a dove in the sky," he says. "But what's really interesting is that she has Edna Goodhue's face, and Trullinger didn't live with her for another 10 years."
A similarly interesting story comes from Gearhart art collector and real estate agent Walter Daggett, who has three Trullinger landscapes - including one he picked up for $35 in an Astoria estate sale. But the picture he'd like to own eludes him. "My wife's family homesteaded around here in the 1880s," he says. "She had a great-aunt, Ethel, who had a suitor her father didn't like. He was the great love of her life and she never married - in fact, she was the postmistress in Gearhart for about 20 years. "When she died, her things went to a sister and when the sister died, they found this beautiful portrait of Ethel as a young woman in the attic - painted by Trullinger. I guess he was the suitor her father ran off."
Whatever their fame and almost-fame, both Bryant and Trullinger left this world in the same modest state: When Trullinger died at the Multnomah Hospital on Aug. 26, 1960, he was unknown and penniless. He's buried at Lincoln Memorial Park in Southeast Portland.
After employment in his family's business in Astoria, Oregon, John Trullinger began producing portraits circa 1895. In 1902 he left to pursue his art studies in England at Newlyn School in Cornwall and at the Academy of Stanhope Forbes. He then moved to Paris where he studied from 1904 to 1909 at Academie Julian, Academie de Colarossi, and Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.
His painting "Lady with a Parasol" was accepted for exhibition in the Paris Salon in 1909. Trullinger returned to Portland in 1910, opened a studio and had a brief one-man show at the Portland Art Museum the same year.
Over the years, he secured numerous commissions for portraits, painted in a strongly academic and conservative style. By contrast, his landscape work was impressionistic, disctinctive and experimental, often characterized by extensive buildup of gesso upon the canvas over which he would apply oil washes, allowing the textured gesso underneath to shine through the pigment. Sadly, this techique has contributed to cracquelure seen in many of the paintings that have survived.
Trullinger continued to paint impressionistically long past its decline as a favored mode among American artists. He was also employed as an artist for the WPA.
http://www.askart.com/askart/t/john_henry_trullinger/john_henry_trullinger.aspx
|
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
