17 Facts About Grace Hudson

Grace Carpenter Hudson was an American painter based in Northern California.

Grace Hudson was nationally known during her lifetime for a numbered series of more than 684 portraits of the local Pomo natives.

Grace Hudson painted the first, National Thorn, after her marriage in 1891.

Grace Hudson's mother Helen McCowen was one of the first white school teachers educating Pomo children and was a commercial portrait photographer in Ukiah, California; her father Aurelius Ormando Carpenter was a skilled panoramic and landscape photographer who chronicled early Mendocino County frontier enterprises such as logging, shipping and railroading.

At fourteen years of age, Grace Hudson was sent to attend the recently established San Francisco School of Design, an art school that emphasized painting from nature rather than from memory or by copying existing works.

Grace Hudson had come to California from Nashville, Tennessee, in 1889 to serve as physician for the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad.

Grace Carpenter Hudson painted National Thorn in 1891; it was selected to be shown at the Minneapolis Art Association exhibit, where it proved very popular.

Grace Hudson's painting Little Mendocino was exhibited in the California State Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

In 1894, Little Mendocino was hung at the Midwinter Fair in San Francisco, resulting in Grace Hudson gaining further commissions for works in a similar vein.

Grace Hudson said that because of the indigenous belief that being sketched or photographed would result in a negative outcome, she had to use elaborate ruses to make private portraits of the infants.

From this time forward, Grace Hudson meticulously photographed and documented each of her works; she was concerned that numerous counterfeit copies were being produced.

Grace Hudson often used the camera as the initial basis for her oil portraits, as it allowed the human subject to be captured quickly.

Grace Hudson took pains to conceal this practical convenience from the art world, as it was considered an inferior method at the time.

Grace Hudson documented Northern California native activities, and made an extensive study of aboriginal fish trapping methods.

Grace Hudson accompanied John on much of his field work.

In 1904, Grace Hudson accepted a commission from the Field Columbian Museum to go to the Oklahoma Territory for an extended period and paint additional images of the Pawnee.

Grace Hudson left The Sun House and its land to her nephew, Mark Carpenter.