The Golden Hills of California -William Seltzer Rice

The Golden Hills of California—a trademark signifier of the beginning of summer—prominently dominate this watercolor from the SMCMoA’s permanent collection acquired in 2006. The landscape's deep colors of earthy green, golden yellow, brush sage, clay brown, and light blue wash over the composition, luring the viewer for a walk along a dirt path into the uninhabited rolling terrain.

Untitled (Bay Area Hills), William S. Rice (1873-1963), n.d. watercolor on paper, 13 x 15 5/8 inches. Collection of Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art Permanent Collection [2006.7.2]

The artist William Seltzer Rice, born on June 23, 1873, grew up in the small town of Manheim, Pennsylvania. The Rice family owned a carriage-painting business, which helped ensure William's access to art lessons at an early age. In 1893, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia. Upon graduating, William began taking classes under the acclaimed American illustrator Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institution. Shortly after, he gained employment as a staff artist at The Philadelphia Times.

In 1900, with the help of his friend Frederick Meyer, William left the east coast and accepted the job of art supervisor at the Stockton public schools in California. When he was not teaching, William explored the California landscape, visiting sites such as Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and the twenty-one Spanish missions.  By 1910, he relocated to the Bay Area and taught art classes in Alameda and Oakland public high schools. Fredrick had located to the Bay Area shortly after William's arrival and founded the art school that later would be named the California College of Arts (CCA) (formerly CCAC). In summer, William would instruct classes at the college, enabling him to earn his B.F.A in 1929. William lived and worked in Oakland until his death on August 27, 1963.   

This watercolor, most likely created between 1910 and 1940, exudes the colors and mood specific to the Northern California landscape and the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement in America. The Arts and Crafts movement emerged during the late Victorian era. Anxieties about industrial life fueled a resurgence in philosophy and practices to promote handcraft designs that debased mechanization and reaffirmed the maker's process in aesthetics, beauty, and simplicity of everyday design. William embodied these craftsman ideals, as he worked in various media seeking to emphasize the process of creating as well as ensuring honesty of materials. He depicted subjects deemed beautiful, such as the natural Californian environment surrounding him. 

At this time, many contemporary European and American artists, including Helen Hyde, whose work is explored in a later fold of this series, were influenced by Japanese woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world" which came to inspire and define aesthetic ideals fueling the Arts and Crafts movement. William's exposure to the ukiyo-e at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco marked a shift in his artistic practices as he began exploring block and linoleum prints, which later came to define William's artistic style. Indeed, William wrote two teaching texts, Block Printing in the Schools (1929) and Block Prints: How to Make Them (1941). William's breadth of work, from watercolor to woodblocks as well as teachings, from Bay Area high schools to the CCA, came to significantly impact the process and aesthetic legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement, which is still visible in West Coast culture today. 

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sources:

"Artist Biography for William Seltzer Rice". AskArt.com. Accessed July 15, 2020.

Hughes, Edan Milton. (1989) "California Artist William S. Rice". Artists in California 1786-1940, Hughes Publishing Company, ISBN 0-9616112-1-9  

Obniski, Monica. "The Arts and Crafts Movement in America." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/acam/hd_acam.htm (June 2008).

further readings:

Treseder, Roberta Rice (2009). William S. Rice: California Block Prints. Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, ISBN 978-0-7649-4803-9