Mission San Juan Capistrano Ivy Corridor Silver Gelatin Hand Tinted Edith Webb
Mission San Juan Capistrano Ivy Corridor Silver Gelatin Hand Tinted Edith Webb 1910s. Condition: Hand tinted photo silver, Print: area size 9 3/8 X 7 3/8 inches. Frame size: 17 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches. If Edith Webb’s name is now known outside of a small group of family and friends it is as author of Indian Life at the Old Missions, perhaps the finest book ever written about the California Missions. That book was the culmination of many decades of research on the missions. Her initial curiosity about the missions came about because her grandmother had resided in one of the rooms of Mission Dolores in San Francisco in the period just before the Gold Rush. Born in Utah, Edith Buckland Webb moved to California around the turn of the century. Her husband, whom she met here, was a teacher and a photographer. This latter talent of his was to be of great use during her research in the succeeding years; his first photograph of a mission shows her in a carriage with their first-born Alfred at age three months in front of Mission Dolores. In succeeding years she was occupied with raising a family, but she also applied her considerable artistic talents to the tinting of his photographs for sale. His photographs were exhibited in many salons, and he supplied photographic postcards and enlargements to several of the missions, especially San Diego, San Juan Capistrano, and San Fernando. By about 1923 she abandoned the simple tinting of photographs and began to devote herself seriously to painting, especially, though not exclusively, of the missions. These paintings were usually closely based on his photographs.