Dorr Bothwell was one of a number of California artists associated with Post-Surrealism beginning in the 1930s. According to scholar Susan Ehrlich, the Post-Surrealists “boldly explored the subconscious, but instead of privileging neuroses, as their [Surrealist] peers on the Continent tended to do, they honored the rational mind. The grotesque and bizarre they staunchly avoided, as they did dictates of the libido, preferring to channel desire into contemplative avenues. Toward this end they devised intriguing tableaux imbued with the feel of crystallized dreams.” Bothwell’s Post-Surrealist, illusionistic fantasies—which often incorporate autobiographical references—have been called “dreamy narratives born of personal reverie…with tightly rendered symbolic scenes, structured to stimulate rumination.”
Bothwell was born, studied, and began her career in San Francisco, though her adolescent years were spent in San Diego. Travel later became part of the artist’s life: in 1928 she visited Samoa, and in the early 1930s she went to France, Belgium, and Germany, returning to Europe in 1949. In between those two European trips, Bothwell lived for a time in Los Angeles, where she worked in the mural division of the Federal Arts Project and joined the group of Post-Surrealists who had coalesced around fellow painters Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg. She moved back to San Francisco in 1942.
Bothwell’s second journey to Europe (1949-1951) was as one of twelve passengers on a freighter from San Francisco to France; it took 48 days and went via the Panama Canal. Keepsake from Panama is one of the series of souvenir paintings Bothwell made around mid-century, which she called alternately “Keepsake, Souvenir, Requerdo [sic],” “Recollection,” or “Memory,” or simply titled after the place she was remembering. The imagery of Keepsake from Panama includes leitmotifs that run throughout Bothwell’s work and reflect the Surrealist roots of her art, such as the eye, lowering clouds, and architectural elements.