Ernest Clifford Peixotto

American illustrator, 1869–1940

BiographyErnest Clifford Peixotto (1669-1940) studied art in his native San Francisco at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art with Emil Carlsen, who encouraged him to go to Paris. Peixotto went to France in 1888 and studied at the Académie Julian with Constant, Doucet, and Lefebvre. He returned to San Francisco in 1894, where he was a founder of The Lark literary magazine during his year there, and then moved in 1895 to New York City, where he joined the staff of Scribner's Magazine.

In his notes, Peixotto described his 1898 summer at Chadds Ford, where both he and Howard Pyle were preparing illustrations for Henry Cabot Lodge's Story of the Revolution, serialized in Scribner's in 1898 and subsequently published in two volumes.

Peixotto returned to France on a sketching trip for Scribner's, and stayed for six years in Fontainebleau, though he frequently made trips to the US, as well as to South America and various European locales for his illustration assignments and other work. He became especially well-known for architectural sketches.

In 1911, Peixotto completed the first of several murals, his Morte D'Arthur, for the railroad magnate Henry A. Everett's Cleveland home.

During World War I, Peixotto was one of the eight official artists attached to the American Expeditionary Force charged with recording the events of the war. He remained in France until 1919, working for both French and American interests.

Peixotto was president of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1929 to 1935. From 1935 to 1940 he served on the Art Commission of New York City; he was director of murals for the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Sources:
“Artists in California, 1786-1940, II", by Edan Milton Hughes; and, Online Archive of California, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley
A Small School of Art, Rowland Elzea and Elizabeth Hawkes, eds., Delaware Art Museum, 1980

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