FRANCES GEARHART

Welcome

This website is designed to introduce visitors to the color block prints of Frances Gearhart (1869-1958). Most of her prints were produced between 1920 and 1940. In the mid 1990’s when I first became acquainted with her work, I thought that her prints were the most striking, beautiful, and skilled examples of color woodcuts of western United States (mainly California) landscapes I had ever seen. I wanted to learn more about her and to see more of her work. I soon learned that this was not so simple. There was no catalogue raisonné of her prints, and there was no single source to go to. Also, little reliable information was available about exact dates or edition size of different prints. Even titles proved problematic because many prints did not have titles, and different dealers and institutions sometimes assigned different titles to the same image.  

I created this website to compile in one place as many images of Gearhart’s color block prints that I have been able to locate. I have not included watercolors, black and white images, or the series of prints she did in collaboration with her sister May for “Let’s Play”, an unpublished children’s book. Although to the best of my knowledge, the number of images that I have found and included in this web site is far greater than anyone else has put together for the public in one place, the collection is still not at all complete. I estimate that I may be missing around 25 to 50 other prints that she made. I also have not been able to definitively resolve many questions about dates. As  for edition size, as far as I can tell it is almost always 50 or less. In the few cases where exact edition size is noted, I have included this information.

If you own or know of the location of a print by Frances Gearhart that you do not see here, please contact me at: Hleitenb@uvm.edu.  If I can obtain more images of her work, perhaps a complete catalogue raisonné of her color block prints will be possible.  Also, since I do not have publication ready photos of all the jpeg images that I have here, I would also appreciate your contacting me if you own any Gearhart prints. It would be nice to compare what you have with what I have.