With the turn of the century, when Impressionism had only recently become an accepted American style, Southern California experienced an influx of young artists, most of whom had been trained in that style and had never known any other.  The period from 1900 to 1915 marks the flowering of California Impressionism.

Much has been offered about the desirability of the southern California climate, with its generous number of sunny days, as motivation for the advent of Impressionism in the southern part of the state.  Likewise, the southward migration caused by the San Francisco earthquake of April, 1906, was significant.  Both factors exerted considerable influence, however, the chief motivation was surely economic opportunity.  Los Angeles, at the time not having an ingrained artistic establishment, became the alternative metropolitan center that absorbed the infusion of young artists in California in the late nineteenth century.

Among the important artists who came to southern California in the first ten years of the twentieth century, one can count the luminaries of the Plein-Air style: Granville Redmond (1871-1935), Hanson D. Puthuff (1875-1972), Marion Kavanagh Wachtel (1876-1954), Franz A. Bischoff (1864-1929), William Wendt (1865-1946), Jack Wilkinson Smith (1873-1949), George Gardner Symons (1862-1930), Jean Mannheim (1863-1945) and Maurice Braun (1877-1941).  In addition, Edgar Payne (1883-1947) and Elsie Palmer Payne (1884-1971) were making frequent visits to Los Angeles and Laguna Beach and, by 1914, with the return of Guy Rose and the arrival of Donna Schuster (1883-1953), the stage was set for one of the most remarkable and distinctive schools of regional American art.

Austrian born Franz A. Bischoff was trained in Europe and moved to the United States in 1885.  He quickly established himself as a painter on porcelain, a renown for which he is still held in the highest regard.  In 1900, he visited California and in 1906, he and his family moved to South Pasadena.  Once in California, he was seduced by the glorious landscape and light and turned to easel painting.  He traveled throughout California, producing remarkable views of the natural beauty of his adopted state.

William Wendt came from Germany to the United States in 1880, settling in Chicago where he worked in a commercial art firm.  Essentially self-taught, he attended evening classes at the Art Institute of Chicago for a brief period.  He preferred painting the landscape and became an active exhibitor in Chicago, winning the Second Yerkes Prize at the Chicago Society of Artists exhibition in 1893.

Wendt and his friend Gardner Symons made a number of trips together to California between 1896 and 1904.  In 1906, Wendt settled in Los Angeles with his wife, sculptor Julia Bracken.  Already a successful painter, he quickly became a leading member in the art community and was a founding member of the California Art Club in 1909.  He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1912, the same year that he moved his home and studio to the art colony at Laguna Beach.  Somewhat shy and reclusive, he was that art colony's most important resident artist-teacher.

Deeply spiritual and with the same perspective as the Hudson River School artists, Wendt perceived nature as a manifestation of God and viewed himself as nature's faithful interpreter, rarely including figures or animals in his landscapes.  He worked out of doors, sometimes sketching and sometimes painting large, finished works.  His early works reflect the feathery brush strokes and hazy atmosphere of Impressionism.  In his later works, after about 1912, he employed a distinctive block or hatch-like brushwork giving solidity to natural forms.  A prolific painter, he was called the "dean" of Southern California's landscape painters.

Like Wendt, Edgar Payne was also essentially a self-taught artist.  As a young man, he traveled for a number of years throughout the South, the Midwest, and in Mexico, taking various jobs as a house painter, sign painter, scenic painter, and portrait and mural artist.  He settled in Chicago in 1907 where he enrolled briefly in a portraiture class at the Art Institute of Chicago, leaving after only two weeks.  Establishing himself in Chicago, he began landscape painting in the form of murals and small easel works.

Payne visited California in 1909 and spent some time painting in Laguna Beach.  While in San Francisco, he met his future wife, artist Elsie Palmer (1884-1971).  He returned to California in 1911 and married Elsie in November, 1912.  Together, they became well established in Chicago art circles and made annual trips to California.

In the summer of 1917 they moved to Glendale, California; then, in November, they moved to Laguna Beach.  An active force in the budding Laguna Beach art colony, Edgar was a founding member and first president of the Laguna Beach Art Association in 1918.

Payne painted throughout California, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well as in Canada.  No locale was too remote.  He was one of the first artists to routinely paint in the High Sierra, living for weeks at his elaborate campsites.  In the summer of 1922, the Paynes went to Europe, painting over a two-year period in France, Switzerland, and Italy.  Always the painter of high mountains, his painting of Mont Blanc entitled The Great White Peak received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon in the spring of 1923.  Upon their return to the United Stares in the fall of 1924, the Paynes settled in Los Angeles with frequent visits to Laguna Beach.

Guy Rose, who is generally regarded as the most important figure of this style, was born in San Gabriel, just east of Los Angeles, in 1867.  He left in 1885 to study art in San Francisco and continued to France in 1888.  For years, he lived in New York and Paris, with occasional visits home to Los Angeles, until 1904, when he and his wife, Ethel, bought a house in Giverny, the small French village that was Monet’s home.  They left Giverny in 1912, returned to New York until sometime in October, 1914, when the couple came home to Los Angeles.  After six years of living and painting in California, Guy Rose suffered a debilitating stroke on February 2, 1921.  Thereafter, he never painted again.  Rose died, on November 17, 1925.

Rose’s prominence as an artist had preceded him to Los Angeles.  Indeed, his status as an internationally known Impressionist, with a long list of exhibitions and awards in prestigious exhibition both in Europe and in the United States, made him a figure of near reverence to the members of the Los Angeles art community.  Had it been any other important artist who chose to live in Los Angeles, the attention would have been considerable, but this was a “Native Son,” who had returned in triumph to the outstretched arms of a devoted following.