Victor Matson

Victor Stanley Matson (1895–1972) was an American artist representative of the California Plein-Air school of painting.

Matson studied landscape and marine painting with Jack Wilkinson Smith and William T. McDermitt; print making with Frank Geritz; and etching with Trude Hanscom.

[1] Matson was born and grew up in Salt Lake City, part of the large community of people of Scandinavian descent that had immigrated in the era of Mormon settlement in the 19th century.

Matson moved to Southern California to take an engineering job in 1922, settling first in Long Beach.

During the 1920s, Alhambra, California there was a small arts community on Champion Place, known as "Artist's Alley," where Jack Wilkinson Smith (1873–1949), Frank Tenney Johnson (1874–1939) and Clyde Forsyth (1885–1962) had their homes and studios and where Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) spent many of his summers.

In the last days of the Arts and Crafts Movement he made woodblock prints of familiar California subjects like the San Gabriel Mission, palm trees, and his own home.

Among other venues, his prints were exhibited at El Alisal, the Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859–1928) home in Highland Park, California.

For several decades, Matson was one of the most active artists on the Southern California art club scene.

Between World War II and the mid-1970s, when interest in Plein-Air painting was at its lowest ebb, he played a crucial role in keeping these traditional organizations operating and the painterly landscape before the public.

Matson was never a major California painter but he served as an important link in maintaining the Plein-Air tradition.