House and Garden is a lithograph created in 1939 by American artist Marguerite Redman Dorgeloh. It is pencil signed and titled and bears the WPA stamp “MAR 7 1939” on the verso. Though it bears no edition number it was printed in an edition of about 28 impressions. It was published under the auspices of the Federal Art Project and is listed as FA3001on page 258 in the General Services Administration’s WPA Artwork in Non-Federal Repositories. House and Garden is printed on cream wove Warren’s Oldestyle watermarked paper and the image measures 11 by 12-7/8 inches.
According to Karla Andersen’s article “The Octagon House,” San Francisco hosted up to eight octagon-shaped houses in the Victorian era. Two remain today: the Feusier House on Russian Hill, a private residence, and the Cow Hollow house built for William C. McElroy in 1861. The octagon house featured in Dorgeloh’s House and Garden is the McElroy house before it was moved. In 1951, Pacific Gas and Electric decided to develop the property and sold the house for $1.00 to the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. The organization moved the house across the street to 2645 Gough Street and restored it. The house is on the National Registrar of Historic Places.
Marguerite Redman Dorgeloh (née Marguerite Redman), printmaker and painter, was born in Watsonville, California on December 14, 1890. Her father, Christy Gentry Redman, was a farmer. Marguerite studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and the San Jose Teachers College. She married John Dorgeloh, a prominent San Francisco lawyer and official at the Bank of America, and spent most of her career in San Francisco. Their son Justin was born in 1913 and, in 1918, she is listed as a decorator in San Francisco. After her divorce from John Dorgeloh, Marguerite married Albert E. Byron, MD. Her work is sometimes signed Redman Byron, Dorgeloh, or Redman Dorgeloh. She preferred being called “Redman.”
During the Depression, Dorgeloh assisted on the WPA mural project in San Francisco’s Coit Tower. She also worked in the graphic art department of the WPA and produced a large number of lithographs for the San Francisco Fine Arts Project (FAP). Her images included many San Francisco landmarks and the Golden Gate Park area. Her lithograph entitled Van Ness Mansion appeared on the front page of the San Francisco News on 6 November 1941. Dorgeloh also worked in etching, oil, and watercolor.
During the second season of the Golden Gate International Exposition which opened on May 25, 1940, the Exposition’s Fine Arts Palace was transformed into an active arts section in which artists worked and demonstrated art making. The program was called Art in Action and Dorgeloh demonstrated lithography using stones. After the Depression, she worked in the 1940s as an artist for a shipyard company.
Dorgeloh exhibited at the Paul Elder Gallery in San Francisco in 1929, the San Francisco Women Artists in 1931, the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939/1940, and the San Francisco Arts Association in 1939. Her work is represented in the collections of the University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames; the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Jordon Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene; the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; the Monterey Museum of Art, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington; the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson; and the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Marguerite Redman Dorgeloh died in Pasadena, California, on March 18, 1944.
