Alice Brown Chittenden

Alice Brown Chittenden (October 14, 1859 – October 13, 1944) was an American painter based in San Francisco, California who specialized in flowers, portraits, and landscapes. Her life's work was a collection of botanicals depicting California wildflowers, for which she is renowned and received gold and silver medals at expositions. She taught at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art (now the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1897 to 1941.

Personal life Chittenden was born in Brockport, New York on October 14, 1859 to Joseph Gladding Chittenden and Ann Miriam Green Chittenden. Ann M. Chittenden gave birth to five children, only 2 of which reached adulthood.

Her father worked in wood mills in San Francisco. She attended Denman Grammar School and won a silver medal for being at the top of her class when she graduated in 1876.

She married Charles Parshall Overton in 1886 but left him and returned to her parents home in 1887, a few months before her daughter Miriam Overton was born in 1887. Overton became vice president and manager of the Union Fish Company in San Francisco. Alice was divorced by 1900 when she and her daughter, Miriam, lived with her mother on Octavia Street in San Francisco. Her sister, Carrie, and her family also lived with Ann M. Chittenden. Carrie's husband was William Taylor, a sea captain. Chitterden never remarried. Artists then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplyfying this emerging type through their own lives." Chittenden exemplified the "New Woman" through her activism for social reform and the suffrage movement.

Career She painted throughout her life. Although she did travel to the East Coast of the United States, Italy and France to study and exhibit during her life, her career was rooted in San Francisco where she was considered the "Grand Dame" of Nineteenth Century San Francisco women artists, who was said to have "evinces a powerful genius" through the "magic of her brush." Chittenden was named the leading flower painter of America in Kate Field's Washington newspaper in March 1895. who was the curator of botany at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Her works were so precise that they added not only to art, but also to the field of science. Robert Gordon Sproul, President of the University of California; and Judge John H. Boalt who donated funds to build the first Boalt Hall which houses the University of California School of Law at UC Berkeley. She also painted many landscapes. In 1907 through at least 1918 Chittenden was an assistant professor of drawing at the California School of Design.

Chittenden was the first woman to be a juror of the San Francisco Art Association exhibitions.

In 1941 she retired from her teaching position at the California School of Fine Arts and was made a lifetime member of the San Francisco Art Association for her distinguished career.

In 1965, 261 oil paintings of wildflowers were exhibited at the California Historical Society. The studies had been in storage at the California Academy of Sciences. A limited publication of 1,000 copies of four of her wildflower paintings was printed and issued in 1968 by Lawton and Alfred Kennedy. From the Elizabeth Hay Bechtel Collection at the University of California, Berkeley, the paintings included Chamomile, Mayweed; Thimbleberry; Fairy Lantern, Globe Lily; and Common Evening Primrose. An exhibit entitled "California Native Trees" was held in 1992 at the Helen Crocker Russell Library, San Francisco Botanical Garden , Golden Gate Park. The Society of California Pioneers has a portrait and two paintings of historic buildings. Two Silver Medals: California State Fair, 1891–92 Silver Medal: San Francisco Industrial Exposition, 1893 Silver Medal: California Mid Winter International Exposition, 1894 Silver Medal: World Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1902–03 Silver Medal: Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of Seattle, 1909 Silver Medal: Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of Portland, 1905