Tilden Daken (June 14, 1876 – April 24, 1935) was an American landscape painter known primarily for his oil paintings of the California redwoods, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the countryside scenery of Northern California and Southern California. He also painted in Alaska, Mexico, Baja, the Hawaiian Islands, the South Seas, and parts of the East Coast of the United States. Between 1900 and 1930, Daken was associated with the California Impressionism art movement in which artists painted out of doors en plein air in California. Daken was primarily influenced by the genres of Tonalism, the American Barbizon school, and Academic Art. Principally self-taught, he began his career painting frescos, murals, and stage curtains. Daken exhibited in the leading galleries of the day in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. His works are held by at least eight museums and he is mentioned in over a dozen books. Art historian Edan Milton Hughes estimated Tilden Daken painted more than 4000 works. Named Samuel Tilden Daken at birth, at about the age of forty he dropped his first name, changed the spelling of his surname to Dakin, and signed his works Tilden Dakin. His earlier signature styles: S.T. Daken and S. Tilden Daken.
Celebrity
Famous in his day, Daken's every movement was tracked by the press, revealing the social, cultural, and political times in which he lived and the noted personalities of the era with whom he mingled: bohemians, revolutionists, politicians, fellow artists, writers, musicians, and Hollywood film stars and directors: Jack London, American novelist, journalist, and social activist; James D. Phelan, San Francisco Mayor and United States Senator; vaudeville star Sophie Tucker, with whom Daken had an affair; Aline Barnsdall, who built the Hollyhock House on Olive Hill in East Hollywood; Aimee Semple McPherson, the Los Angeles Pentecostal evangelist and national celebrity; director Hal Roach, best known for his "Laurel and Hardy" and "Our Gang" ("The Little Rascals") comedy series; silent film star Virginia Lee Corbin; and others of the film world. He also befriended a number of fellow Impressionists, including: William Keith, the Scottish-American Early California Artist whom Daken long considered his mentor; watercolorist Lorenzo Latimer; Mary S. Morrow, whom Daken tutored; Maurice Logan, member of the Society of Six; Impressionist Thaddaeus Welch; Impressionist and photographer Clyde Eugene Scott; Eugene Califano and Jack Califano (two of the twelve sons of the celebrated Italian painter John Edmund Califano); and Impressionists Carl Sammons, Arthur William Best; Clarkson Dye; and Paul Lauritz.
Life
Early years and family The youngest of five children, Daken was born in 1876 in Bunker Hill, Illinois. In 1879, the family immigrated to Sacramento, California. Born and raised in humble circumstances, Daken was unschooled, mined for gold with his father in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode, and developed an early passion for classical music, nature, and painting en plein air. At the age of nine, he apprenticed as a decorator and interior painter, and by his teens was a fresco painter in San Francisco. In 1903, Daken married native San Franciscan Mary "May" Elizabeth Duplissea. That same year in San Francisco, Daken opened a studio on Van Ness Avenue, destroyed three years later in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, along with an untold number of his paintings. In the summer of 1906, the Dakens moved to Glen Ellen, California. They lived at the Mineral Springs and Health Resort on Sonoma Creek, where their two daughters were born.
Sonoma County years (1906-1912) In Glen Ellen, California, Daken rekindled his friendship with Jack London. He and London had first met in 1901 in the Reno Station in Nevada and together rode the brake beams of a freight car on the Union Pacific Railroad to Oakland, California. Daken often painted at Jack London's Beauty Ranch in Glen Ellen, now the Jack London State Historic Park. In 1909, the Daken family moved to nearby Santa Rosa, California, where Daken was appointed head of the art department at Ursuline College for two years.
San Francisco, Mexico, PPIE, Lake Tahoe (1912-1922) In 1912, the Dakens left Sonoma County and returned to San Francisco, where Daken opened a studio on Gough Street. In mid-1913, during the Mexican Revolution, Daken left his family and moved to Mexico to paint and scout material for San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE). In Mazatlán, he made hundreds of charcoal drawings and painted numerous scenes of the Sierra Madre Mountains in the red palette. In 1914, in or around Mazatlán, he was shot three times and held a prisoner of war for two months, at the height of the disputes between Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa. After nearly two years in Mexico, he returned to San Francisco and exhibited the "Mexican Exhibit" in the Palace of Agriculture at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, including his mural El Rosario River of the West Coast of Mexico. In 1918, Daken divorced May Duplissea Daken amid scandal and publicized court proceedings. In 1922, Daken spent months in the Lake Tahoe region, resulting in a collection of 100 works, painted in diverse seasons, which he exhibited as the "Northern California Alps" collection.
Hollywood Years (1923-1925) In early 1923, Daken moved to Hollywood, where he hobnobbed with film stars, directors, and other noted personalities of the era. He leased a home and studio in Corte de Linda Vista, a cluster of Spanish-inspired garden bungalows on Hayworth Avenue, today known as West Hollywood. Daken is best known during his Hollywood years for his paint-to-music genre which he performed on stage in various venues including the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. In 1923, Daken embarked on a trip to New Guinea to paint the headhunters. He was accompanied by Andrew Hooten Blackiston, an anthropologist and lawyer who donated some of his archeological finds to Smithsonian museums.
Marin County Years (1925-1930) In 1925, Daken returned to Northern California and married his second wife, Florence Kainer. In the town of Mill Valley, he built a home and studio amongst the redwoods in the style of the arts and crafts movement. In early 1930, at the onset of the Great Depression, Daken lost his Mill Valley home in foreclosure.
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