Edna Stoddart

Career Highlights –

• Born Edna Lehnhardt in Oakland, California in 1888, Edna Stoddart was the daughter of Emil and “Hattie” Lehnhardt, the former a successful merchant who established the famed Lehnhardt’s ice cream emporium, and the latter the sister of Josephine Earp, the common-law wife of legendary Old West sheriff Wyatt Earp.
• When she was only 17, Stoddart married Estes Joseph Cowing and had two children, Marjorie and Emil, before the marriage ended in divorce. She was a student in 1920 at the time of her second marriage, to Herbert Allen Stoddart. She began using the Stoddart surname and continued to do so even after her husband’s death in 1929.
• Stoddart studied at the University of California, Berkeley; Mills College and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland; the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco; and under artists Glenn Wessels, Felix Ruvolo, Mark Rothko, Jean Varda, Fernand Leger, and others.
• In 1947 Stoddart won the Purchase Prize in the San Francisco Art Association’s 11th Annual Watercolor Exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art for her landscape painting I Remember That Day. Through the late 1940s and 1950s Stoddart continued to exhibit with the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art and de Young Museum (also winning prizes in their watercolor annuals in 1952 and 1956), as well as with the Mills College Ceramic Guild at Fenner Fuller’s Gallery in Oakland and the California Watercolor Society annual at the Pasadena Art Institute.
• In 1950, a painting by Stoddart was among those accepted for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s national exhibition “American Painting Today – 1950,” and she was the recipient of the President’s Purchase Prize at the 1952 exhibition of San Francisco Women Artists.
• Stoddart exhibited with the California Watercolor Society at the Fine Arts Gallery in San Diego (now the San Diego Museum of Art) in 1954, along with Francis de Erdely, Phil Dike, Sueo Serisawa, and others. She was also included in exhibitions in San Francisco at Area Arts, Frank Newman’s, and the City of Paris Rotunda Gallery.
• In the early 1950s, through their mutual friend the photographer Johan Hagemeyer, Stoddart met Louis Bassi Siegriest, who was one of the group of artists known as the Oakland Society of Six. After their marriage in 1958, their Oakland home (a Victorian built by Siegriest’s father in 1899) became a gathering place for the young artists of the East Bay Area. Stoddart and Siegriest were very supportive of each other’s work, and Stoddart set up her studio in the tank house of an old windmill on the property.
• Stoddart occasionally exhibited with Siegriest and his artist son, Lundy, which gained them the reputation as “Oakland’s First Family of the Arts.” Stoddart and Siegriest were included in a nationwide touring San Francisco Art Bank exhibition in 1962, and there was a “Siegriest Family Exhibit” (including Stoddart, Louis and Lundy Siegriest, and Lundy’s wife, Gerry) at the Gallery de Silva in Santa Barbara in 1963.
• A solo show “Edna Stoddart: The Poetic Image” took place at Fredric Hobbs Galleries in San Francisco in 1961; and she went on to have solo shows at the Karamanduca Art Gallery, San Francisco, in 1963, 1965, and 1966; the Junior Center of Art and Science, Oakland in 1963; and the College of Notre Dame-Belmont, CA in 1966.
• Stoddart was included in a San Francisco Art Association traveling show including Otis Oldfield, Wayne Thiebaud and others in 1961, and through the 1960s she also exhibited at the Oakland Art Gallery (later the Oakland Museum of California) and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
• In the 1960s Stoddart was represented by the Triangle Gallery in San Francisco, and she had a solo show there in 1964. Stoddart was one of a group of artists who broke away from the San Francisco Art Association into the Artists Association of the San Francisco Art Institute with a show at the de Young Museum in 1964 including Louis Siegriest, Ruth Armer, and others.
• After traveling earlier in the year to the Soviet Union, Stoddart and Siegriest took a painting holiday to Mexico in 1966, and it was there that Stoddart passed away due to heart failure. She was buried in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and during her funeral service “flocks and flocks of chirruping small birds lighted in trees and bushes along the road to the cemetery…. Like a Rivera mural, Indians lined the way, hats in hand, heads bowed.” Said her husband, Louis Siegriest, “Edna would have loved it.”
• There was a solo show of Stoddart’s work at the Charles Campbell Gallery, San Francisco in 1981, and at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland (with Camille Holvoet) in 1987. Siegriest-Stoddart family shows (including work by Stoddart, and Louis and Lundy Siegriest) took place at the Richard Nelson Gallery, UC Davis in 1980 and at the San Jose Museum of Art in 1981. Stoddart’s works are held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Edna Stoddart Memorial Fund was established at the Oakland Art Museum of California.