Gifted

Considered one of the most popular artistic styles even today, impressionism evolved throughout the late 19th century in France. At the time, Paris was the center of the western art world and was driven by the French Academy of Fine Arts’ prestigious Salon exhibitions. At the time, a group of artists with now-familiar names including Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and others, were experimenting with a radically different style of painting characterized by quick, spontaneous brushwork, brighter colors and thick, textured paint strokes. Painting quickly, they emphasized capturing the effect of light on their subjects and creating a visceral sense of the immediacy of the moment.

In 1919, Gardena High School Principal, John H. Whitley, embarked on a program for students in the senior class that was devised to lend crucial support to their cultural foundation. He encouraged the students to acquire works of art for the walls of the high school as their senior gifts, describing them as “silent teachers”. The students’ first selection, made as a result of a visit to the artist’s studio, was Valley of the Santa Clara, by Ralph Davison Miller. The moody painting of storm clouds hanging over a rocky outcropping is of the lush agricultural river valley in Ventura County, running from the San Gabriel Mountains west to the Pacific Ocean. The students likely selected Miller’s painting both for its aesthetic properties and because it was a landscape of a rural farming area not unlike the Gardena Valley.