1. Carl Eytel was a German American artist who built his reputation for paintings and drawings of desert subjects in the American Southwest.
16 Facts About Carl Eytel
1. 2.
Carl Eytel was born as Karl Adolf Wilhelm Eytel in Maichingen, Boblingen to Tusnelda and Friederick Hermann Eytel, a Lutheran minister in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg, Germany.
3.
Carl Eytel was well educated in the German gymnasium and became enamored of the American West while reading the works of Prussian natural science writer and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, which he found in the Stuttgart Royal Library.
4.
Carl Eytel first traveled to the United States in 1885 aboard the Suevia and worked as a ranch hand in Kansas.
5.
Carl Eytel returned to Germany to study art for 18 months at the Royal Art School Stuttgart and then re-immigrated to the United States.
6.
Carl Eytel often walked on his travels, covering 400 miles in the Colorado Desert on foot.
7.
Carl Eytel's illustrations were used by James in his 1906 article "The Colorado Desert: As General Kearney Saw It".
8.
Carl Eytel was planning to build a bungalow in Beaumont, California.
9.
Besides his work in Wonders of the Colorado Desert and Cone-bearing Trees, Carl Eytel contributed to the best periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times and, for nearly 14 years, the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung.
10.
Carl Eytel possessed a knowledge not only of the Greek and Roman classics but of the best literature of England, America and his native Germany.
11.
Carl Eytel's subjects were varied and included the Mission San Jose de Tumacacori, in the Tumacacori National Historical Park near Nogales, Arizona, and California Mission San Gabriel Arcangel and Mission San Juan Capistrano Spanish missions.
12.
Carl Eytel depicted the life of Navajo, Hopi, Cahuilla, Serrano and Kamia peoples, including landscapes of the New Mexico Eight Northern Pueblos in San Ildefonso, Laguna, Tesuque and Taos Pueblo.
13.
Carl Eytel was a friend of the Cahuilla people and they allowed him to be buried in their cemetery in Palm Springs after he died of tuberculosis in a Banning, California sanatorium.
14.
Carl Eytel received the following eulogy from Saunders writing in August 1926:.
15.
Carl Eytel knew it in all seasons, in all moods, and he painted it with a sort of religious ardor springing from unfailing love, in season and out.
16.
Carl Eytel's painting Desert near Palm Springs is displayed in the California History Room of the California State Library.