Lucia Kleinhans Mathews

A lifelong Californian, she was the wife and partner of artist, Arthur Frank Mathews, a well-regarded painter, muralist, and teacher in the Bay Area.

After a year at Mills, Lucia transferred in 1889 to San Francisco’s California School of Design which “offered [her] professionally focused surroundings that emphasized artistic pursuits above the academic” (Jones, 159).

Mathews, educated more formally in Europe and Paris, instituted many changes to the school, such as deemphasizing courses studying antique sculpture in favor of those on human anatomy using live models, in classrooms separated by gender (Jones, 161).

While at the California School of Design she met and befriended fellow female artists, Florence Lundborg, Marion Holden, and Louise Schwamm (Jones, 161).

This meeting began a career of frequent collaboration between the two artists, seen early in the 1893 Spring Exhibition catalog for the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art where Lucia contributed to the book’s interior and cover design (Jones, 162).

The trip began in London, where “Lucia [started] a travel diary and sketchbook [recording] her [honest] impressions and observations of the city’s art and architecture” and galleries (Jones, 166).

During an extended stay in Paris, Arthur established a small atelier, while Lucia continued her studies in art, briefly enrolling in James McNeill Whistler’s, Academie Carmen (Jones, 168).

At the shop, the Mathews’ designed and decorated furniture, as well as “carpets, draperies, rugs, studio and art rooms” according to a 1910 advertisement in Philopolis Magazine (Jones, 222).

These small decorative items are what Lucia is today most well-known for, a box depicting Monterey Cypress trees and Poppy flowers is one of her most recognizable pieces.

Even though the Furniture Shop and Press closed by 1920, Lucia continued making small decorative objects in a variety of mediums, notably a yearly floral calendar which she sent to friends and relatives and survive today because they became “treasured keepsakes” worthy of framing (Jones, 194).

Widowed in February 1945, she continued living in San Francisco—they had no children—and in a 1948 letter to a local art historian, Brother Cornelius, she derided how “nowadays all painting… have gone modern in a dreadful way” after a visit to the Veterans Museum (Jones, 213).

By the 1950s her health began to decline due to the onset of Parkinson’s Disease, and in 1951, after the death of her younger brother, moved to Los Angeles to be with family.