architect painter university professor
Mathews was born in Markesan, Wisconsin, and lived there until he was six years old. His father was an architect and moved the family to San Francisco in the year 1866. Like his brothers Walter and Edgar, Mathews learned architecture from his father.
He then studied painting at the California School of Design, under the influence of Virgil Macey Williams.
He studied art in Paris at the Académie Julian from 1885 to 1889, where he was influenced by the academic classicism of his teachers Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre, the tonalism of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and the symbolism of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
His students include Granville Redmond, Xavier Martinez, Armin Hansen, Percy Gray, Gottardo Piazzoni, Ralph Stackpole, Mary Colter, Maynard Dixon, Rinaldo Cuneo and Francis McComas. In San Francisco he also worked as a designer and illustrator at a lithography shop. Upon his return from Paris, Mathews taught life classes at the San Francisco Art Students League and the California School of Design.
He became director of the latter in 1890, and in 1894, married Lucia Kleinhans, one of his art students.
He continued to teach there until the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following the earthquake, he and Lucia opened the Furniture Shop in San Francisco.
There he could unleash his combined skills as a craftsman, designer and painter. They also opened Philopolis Press and published the monthly Philopolis magazine, which promoted Arts and Crafts aesthetics in the rebuilding of the city.
Among his many mural commissions was a twelve-panel series in the State Capitol Building, Sacramento.
Afternoon Among the Cypress in the permanent collection of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art is typical of Mathews" landscape paintings of the Monterey Peninsula. Spring Dance at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is one of his many paintings of female figures in semi-classical attire. His work is extensively represented in the Oakland Museum of California.
Mathews was a master of many media: oil painting, watercolor, pastel, gouache and fresco.
He and Lucia designed detailed interior decoration schemes in what became known as the California Decorative Style. They created a variety of furniture, boxes, carved and painted picture frames and many other decorative objects, and even large stained glass windows.
Mathews" work is in the following major museums:
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
New York Metropolitan Museum of Art
Oakland Museum of California
San Diego Museum of Art
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
