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Edith Hamlin was born in 1902, in Oakland, California, where she later studied art at the California School of Fine Arts, and she then studied at the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York.
Born on a ranch near Fresno, California, in 1875, Maynard Dixon became a noted illustrator, landscape, and mural painter of the early 20th-century American West, especially the desert, Indians, early settlers, and cowboys.
In the spring of 1937, Maynard met with Herald R. Clark, the dean of Brigham Young University’s School of Business, and agreed to sell 85 paintings, sketches, and drawings from the span of his entire career for $3,700. BYU has the largest museum collection of Maynard Dixon lifework paintings.
In September 1937, Edith Hamlin married Maynard Dixon (29 years her senior), and in 1939 they moved to Tucson, Arizona. They also purchased 20 acres, set in a grove of cottonwood trees, in the small town of Mount Carmel, Utah, where they built a log-style home. Mount Carmel was their summer retreat from the Arizona desert heat. At this location they spent many days painting the beauty of the region and the pastoral scenes of the area’s numerous farms.
Maynard Dixon wrote,
“Big news is we are going to quit Calif. & build us a log house in Utah, far from any large town. Mormons are simple honest farming people. We like them.”
Together, Maynard Dixon and Edith Hamlin painted western scenes in Arizona and Utah until Maynard Dixon’s death in 1946. After his death, Edith Hamlin returned to San Francisco, where she continued to paint landscapes and murals for the remainder of her life.
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This article originally appeared in Vol.59 No.1 of Pioneer Magazine.
For more information, see www.maynarddixon.org and www.edithhamlin.com
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