Date 1941
Technique Drypoint, Etching
Price $425.00
Exhibitor The Annex Galleries
Contact the Exhibitor 707.546.7352
artannex@aol.com
Buy From / See At This Exhibitor's Site

Deep Cove is and etching and drypoint created in 1941 by American artist Jeannette Maxfield Lewis. This impression is pencil signed and titled and the reference is White 104. Lewis incised the plate with J.M Lewis / 1941 which shows up in the lower right image. Deep Cove was printed by the artist on an ivory laid paper and the platemark measures 7 x 9-3/8 inches. According to White, Deep Cove was printed in an edition of 35.

Jeannette Maxfield Lewis used her summers in Pebble Beach to study with Armin Hansen. She began producing etchings in 1931 and, like Hansen, she drew much of her inspiration from the wharves and fishermen in the Monterey area on the Pacific coast. The subject of Deep Cove is a floating wharf in the Monterey vicinity. In the foreground right are the moored fishing boats and wharves and, in the upper left, a fisherman's shack is perched on a steep hill. A series of wooden stairs connect it with the pier below. The fleet is in and men are alighting from their skiffs.

Jeannette Maxfield Lewis (née Jeannette Maxfield), painter and printmaker, was born to Lulu and Harry Maxfield in Oakland, California on 19 April 1894. Her parents enrolled her in the Castilleja School, an independent school for girls in grades six through twelve in Palo Alto, where she was first exposed to fine art and was inspired to pursue painting. Maxfield enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where she was a student of Gottardo Piazzoni. Maxfield then spent a brief period in New York studying with Hans Hofmann where she was immersed in Modernism, particularly German Expressionism.

Upon returning to California Maxfield was employed for a time at Foster and Kleiser, an outdoor advertising company with a painting factory in San Francisco. After her marriage to Harold Lewis on 11 March 1920, the couple moved to Fresno, California while maintaining a summer home in Pebble Beach. During her summer residences, she studied with Armin Hansen and she began exploring printmaking in 1931.

Jeannette Maxfield Lewis was a member of and exhibited with the San Francisco Society of Women Artists, the California Society of Etchers, the Printmakers Society of California, the Society of Western Artists, the National Association of Women Artists, and the Pacific, Fresno, Santa Cruz, and Carmel Art Associations. Her work was included in numerous group exhibitions and solo exhibitions of her work were mounted at the Crocker Art Gallery in 1946 and the Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1955. In 1979, a retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Fresno Arts Center and, in 1994, the Monterey Museum of Art organized a traveling retrospective of her work.

The Lewis' moved permanently to Pebble Beach in the 1955, and Jeannette continued to work and exhibit. By now, Lewis was known for her work in oil, watercolor, pastel, pen and ink, and etching. Sadly, upon her Harold Lewis’ death in 1964, she abandoned art altogether. 

Jeannette Maxfield Lewis’ work is represented in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee; the New York Public Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Monterey Museum of Art, California; the Oakland Museum of California; the California State Library, Sacramento; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; and the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Jeannette Maxfield Lewis died in Monterey, California on 22  April 1892.