User:Trekker Dave/Gordon Coutts

Gordon Coutts (October 3, 1865 - February 21, 1937) international painter and illustrator. Most known for portraits and landscapes in Australia, California, Morocco and Mexico.

Biography
Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, Gordon Coutts emigrated to Australia around 1886. He returned to Scotland in 1888 for the Glasgow International Exhibition where he studied works of Velasquez in the Old Master loan collection. He was also a student in Paris at the Académie Julian under Tony Robert-Fleury.

Australia
In Melbourne, from around 1890-1893, Coutts was enrolled in the National Gallery Art school where he received honorable mention for the Traveling Artist Scholarship Competition in 1893. During the 1890s, he exhibited with artists from the Heidelberg School, including Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, and David Davies. During this time, he also had many portrait commissions, including a large painting of the entire Melbourne legislative assembly. Around 1896, Coutts moved to Sydney and was an Instructor of Painting at the Art Society of New South Wales, a post which he held until 1899.

Northern California
In 1902, Coutts moved to California. In 1904, he married Alice Hobbs, also a painter, and they settled in San Francisco. He was a member of the Bohemian Club, and often exhibited there, at the Sequoia Club, and at various Bay Area venues with fellow Northern California painters, including Maynard Dixon, Granville Redmond and William Keith. He and Alice survived the 1906 earthquake and they moved across the bay to Piedmont, where they built a house-studio.

Coutts was a prolific illustrator at this time, doing covers for Sunset Magazine, as well as drawings for magazine stories, poetry and books, and also art for calendars and.

Coutts spent much time sketching and painting in and around Marin County, such as at the art colony at Guerneville near the Bohemian Grove.

Abroad
During 1911-1914, Coutts made trips to Europe where he spent many months, including to Scotland and England, the artist colony at Etaples, France, and Paris where he won a place on the wall at the Paris Salons. World War I obliged Coutts to leave Paris for London, and by early 1915 he was back in Piedmont.

In 1916, Coutts returned again to Europe. By war's end, he was painting in Morocco, and later Spain and Mexico, until 1925. During this time, he exhibited at the Royal Academy and other galleries in London.

Southern California
In late 1925, Coutts returned to California, this time to the Southland, where he built a Moroccan-style house-studio-gallery in Palm Springs he named Dar Morroc. While continuing to show at the Royal Academy, he regularly participated in exhibits with other Southern California painters in Los Angeles, Pasadena and Laguna, including William Wendt, Edgar Payne, and William Ritschel, and at the Stendahl Gallery in the Ambassador Hotel.

In 1927, Coutts went back to Australia for his first exhibition there in twenty-five years. He continued to travel about the Southwest United States painting landscapes and portraits, from Santa Barbara to Canyon de Chelly, until a few years before his death in 1937.

Paris Salon
These annual summer exhibitions in Paris were sponsored by the Société des Artistes Français, and were the traditional or 'old' Salons.
 * 1912
 * 1913
 * 1914