Granville Redmond was one of the best and most prominent landscape painters of Los Angeles during the first decade of the century. Born Grenville Richard Seymour Redmond, the artist was four years old when his family moved to San José, California. They later moved to Los Angeles. Having been left completely deaf by scarlet fever, Redmond lived at the California School for the Deaf (then called the Institution of the Deaf, the Dumb, and the Blind) in Berkeley, where he received training in drawing and sculpture. After his graduation in 1890 he next attended the California School of Design in San Francisco, studying with Arthur Mathews (1860-1945) and Amédée Joullin (1862-1917) and receiving recognition for his good work. With funds lent by his former school’s board of directors, in 1893 he was sent to Paris, where he studied with Benjamin Constant (1845-1902) and Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921) at the Académie Julian. He exhibited a winter landscape in the Paris Salon of 1895.
Leaving Paris in 1898, Redmond settled in Los Angeles. He changed his first name to Granville and married in 1899. He painted views of the Los Angeles area until 1908, when he moved to Northern California. In contrast to his absence from exhibitions in later life, during this period he sent works to exhibitions in Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and Seattle. He settled in Parkfield in Monterey County in early 1908, but moved to Menlo Park, California, in 1910, and that year exhibited in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He had solo exhibitions at commercial galleries and in 1914 at the Los Angeles Museum.
In 1917 Redmond returned to Los Angeles and worked as a pantomimist; he was befriended by Charlie Chaplin, who gave him roles in several of his movies, including City Lights (1931). Redmond also had a feature role in Raymond Griffith’s mystery, You’d Be Surprised (1926). Chaplin also gave the artist the use of a studio on his movie lot to paint in, where Redmond worked until shortly before his death in 1935.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Everett C. Maxwell, "Art and Drama Department," West Coast Magazine 13 (December 1912): 347-50 § Arthur Millier, "Our Artists in Person," Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1931, pt. 3, p. 28 § Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, "Five Los Angeles Artists in the Collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art," Southern California Quarterly 57 (Spring 1975): 27-51 § Mildred Albronda, "Granville Redmond: California Landscape Painter," Art and Antiques 5 (November-December 1982): 46-53 § Oakland Museum and others, Granville Redmond, exh. cat., 1988, with text by Harvey Jones and Mary Jean Haley, chronology by Mildred Albronda, bibliography.
