Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1283918
Jules Tavernier – "Twilight Encampment along the Carmel River," circa 1876 This rare early painting captures a quiet reverie of twilight's last glowing embers, rendered from their sylvan encampment along the Carmel River. Collection of Paula and Terry Trotter, Trotter Galleries, Inc. 114 C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R / F A L L 2 0 2 0 A rtists of all types have main- tained a long-held love affair with the Monterey Penin- sula in general, Carmel in par ticular. For nearly one and a half centuries, all manner—poets, musicians, writers, sculptors, painters—have been drawn as moths to a flame by the area's unparalleled beauty, temperate climate and (once) inexpensive cost of living. The earliest Bohemian painters formed a tightly woven community of like-minded professionals. The work they produced was distributed through- out the world to people hungry for glimpses of a Wild American West that was swiftly disap- pearing under the onslaught of rapid popula- tion and technological growth. Their legacy lives on in those who followed these pioneers in choosing the Peninsula as the ideal place to work and raise their families. "Those late 19th- and early 20th-century painters were among the area's first environ- mentalists," says Joaquin Turner, a painter and gallery owner (joaquinturner.com) whose work has been deeply informed and influenced by those innovators. "They saw that the landscape of Monterey was changing," he says. The turn of the century was transitional: this stretch of the Central Coast was evolving from the colonial, horse-and-wagon community it was since the 1700s arrival of Spanish explor- ers. Change came slowly here; it was a sleepy backwater for the most par t, but the innova- tions of the 1900s were slowly being intro-