Pomology is a branch of botany that studies fruits and their cultivation. Someone who researches and practices the science of pomology is called a pomologist. The term fruticulture is also used to describe the agricultural practice of growing fruits in orchards.
Millard Owen Sheets was an American artist, teacher, and architectural designer. He was one of the earliest of the California Scene Painting artists and helped define the art movement. Many of his large-scale building-mounted mosaics from the mid-20th century are still extant in Southern California. His paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum.
Alice Schille (1869–1955) was an American watercolorist and painter from Columbus, Ohio. She was renowned for her Impressionist and Post Impressionist paintings, which usually depicted scenes featuring markets, women, children, and landscapes. Her ability to capture the character of her subjects and landscapes often resulted in her winning the top prize in art competitions. She was also known for her versatility in painting styles; her influences included the “Dutch Old Masters, James McNeill Whistler, the Fauves, and Mexican muralists.” Her estate is represented by Keny Galleries in Columbus, OH.
Joan Hill, also known as Che-se-quah, was a Muscogee Creek artist of Cherokee ancestry. She was one of the most awarded Native American women artists in the 20th century.
Elsie Driggs was an American painter known for her contributions to Precisionism, America's one indigenous modern-art movement before Abstract Expressionism, and for her later floral and figurative watercolors, pastels, and oils. She was the only female participant in the Precisionist movement, which in the 1920s and 1930s took a Cubist-inspired approach to painting the skyscrapers and factories that had come to define the new American landscape. Her works are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Houston Museum of the Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the James A. Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania, and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. She was married to the American abstract artist Lee Gatch.
Wilhelm Heinrich Prestele was a botanical artist known for his lithographs and watercolor work commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture.
Eliza Tibbets was among early American settlers and founders of Riverside, California; she was an activist in Washington, D.C., for progressive social causes, including freedmen's rights and universal suffrage before going to the West Coast. A spiritualist, she led seances in Riverside. She became known for successfully growing the first two hybrid Washington navel orange trees in California.
Riverside, California, was founded in 1870, and named for its location beside the Santa Ana River. It became the county seat when Riverside County, California, was established in 1893.
Mary Agnes Yerkes,, was an American impressionist painter, photographer and artisan. She was skilled in the media of oil, pastel and watercolor. Her professional career was cut short by the Great Depression, but she still continued to paint well into her nineties with a passion for her craft and nature. She is noted for her plein-air painting while camping the American West and its National Parks.
James Marion Shull (1872–1948) was an American botanist known for his iris and daylily cultivars and botanical illustrations.
Deborah Griscom Passmore (1840–1911) was a botanical illustrator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture who specialized in paintings of fruit. Her work is now preserved in the USDA's Pomological Watercolor Collection, and she has been called the best of the early USDA artists. She rose to lead the USDA staff artists, and she became the most prolific of the group, contributing one-fifth of the 7500 paintings in the Pomological Watercolor Collection.
Amanda Almira Newton was a botanical illustrator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) who specialized in watercolors of fruit. Her work is now preserved in the USDA's Pomological Watercolor Collection, and she is the second-most prolific contributor to that archive of 7600 paintings, with her work representing roughly one-sixth of the total.
Royal Charles Steadman was a botanical illustrator and wax fruit modeler for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) who also developed a patented method of strengthening wax fruit with plaster on the interior.
Ellen Isham Schutt was an early 20th-century American botanical illustrator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Her work now forms part of the USDA National Agricultural Library's Pomological Watercolor Collection.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Pomological Watercolor Collection is an archive of some 7,500 botanical watercolors created for the USDA between the years 1886 and 1942 by around five dozen artists. Housed by the United States National Agricultural Library, it is a unique resource documenting existing fruit and nut cultivars, new introductions, and specimens discovered by USDA's plant explorers, representing 38 plant families in all. It has been called "one of the world's most unusual holdings of late 19th and early 20th century American botanical illustrations".
Mary Daisy Arnold was a botanical artist who worked for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for over thirty-five years, painting watercolors of a wide variety of fruits. She is one of the three most prolific artists whose work is now preserved in the USDA's Pomological Watercolor Collection.
California Scene Painting, also known as Southern California Regionalism, is a form of American regionalist art depicting landscapes, places, and people of California. It flourished from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Rexford Elson Brandt was an American artist and educator. Much of his oeuvre consists of paintings inspired by the life and geography of the West Coast of the United States, particularly California. Brandt worked in multiple mediums including print making, oil painting and watercolor painting. He gained national recognition for his watercolor painting during the period from the mid-1930s to the 1990s. Early in his career he was associated with California Scene Painting but after World War II Brandt focused on complex, semi-abstract works. The depiction of the regenerative warmth of the sun was a central focus of his painting; he wrote that "Everyone has hang-ups, I suppose. Mine is sunshine. Not sunlight -- although I like to paint sunlight too."
Isabelle Clark Percy West was an American painter, printmaker, designer, and educator. She was known for landscape paintings, botanical paintings, and early etchings of the Pacific Coast. She was part of the founding faculty of California College of the Arts in Oakland, California.
Roberta Cowing Throckmorton was an American artist, employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
