About the work

Collectors of early California paintings owe much to Carl Eytel (1862-1925), even beyond his role in capturing some of the earliest and most remote views of Southern California’s desert on canvas. Eytel’s early 1900s paintings and drawings from southern California inspired a migration of notable artists to the West, long before any notion of the “Smoketree School” existed.   

As detailed by the Los Angeles Times in 1917, the most beautiful parts of California’s desert country were by no means easy to access before automobile travel was common. It required “the temperament and outfit of a prospector for the artist to reach the most favored spots.” Real “desert rats” like Eytel penetrated the secret places of the desert and brought back canvases that stirred the imaginations of fellow artists in the East. Before long, artists like Clyde Forsythe were using the new possibilities of automobile travel to reach the desert. With a “reliable machine,” scenes that formerly took several day’s journey by “the burro route” could be reached in hours. It was the far-reaching name of Carl Eytel and works like “Sand Dunes Near Palm Springs” that provided the inspiration.

As early as 1909, Eytel’s standing as an artist reached the point where his works were included in an exhibition at Kanst Art Gallery in Los Angeles featuring paintings by notable names like Bill Gollings, Granville Redmond, Benjamin Chambers Brown, and Edward Henry Potthast.

Eytel’s “Sand Dunes Near Palm Springs” was included in the exhibition “Desertscapes, Early California Desert Painters” at the Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts, College of the Desert, in April 2010.

About the artist…

Carl Eytel’s journey to the deserts of California had its unlikely beginning in southern Germany around 1890. It was about that time when Eytel read an enthusiastic article about Palm Springs from the pen of George Hamilton Fitch, editor of the San Francisco Call. The article inspired Eytel to make a fleeting three-day sojourn to America that impressed him so favorably he declared to return. The exact time of his visit is not clear, but an account in the Escondido Times during February 1893 tells of artist Carl Eytel from Buena Park in Orange County exploring some of the canyons around the area. He became so interested in some waterfalls that darkness fell before he realized it. He got down in a deep recess to get a drink and, finding the sides steeper than expected, ended up staying all night. A rescue party went out after him the next day, missed him on the road, and he arrived at the hotel later that morning desperately in need of a meal.

Eytel returned to Germany where he studied at the Royal Art School of Stuttgart. It would be several years before he journeyed back to the American West to explore the strange new world of color, form and life that he found so interesting. Later in life, he was said to have mentioned that he found additional inspiration for his move to America when his family insisted he become a baker.

In 1910, the Los Angeles Times offered an insightful recounting of Eytel’s journey to the Mohave Desert sometime around 1901. It tells of Eytel, a German artist “who emerged from the glittering salons of Paris and Berlin,” to settle down comfortably for the reminder of his career in the arid wilderness of the “Southwestern Sahara.” Fellow Germans said Eytel had descended from one of the oldest and proudest families of the “faderland.” The Times article included yet another source of Eytel’s adoration for the desert, which was a picture in the Louvre titled “The Marriage Mirage.” The work depicted a man and woman in a famished condition pursuing the “Desert Lie”—a mirage of happiness portrayed as a green oasis—in the barren sands of Death Valley. Thereafter, Eytel corresponded with a German artist in Los Angeles and became convinced that the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico and California “afforded a new field for art.” His desire was to become an accurate portrayer of reptiles and desert life.

By 1910 Eytel had established his “headquarters” near Palm Springs, but he never stopped exploring. That same year he traveled on horseback with author J. Smeaton Chase from El Monte through Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties.

Despite the remoteness of his existence and tendency to reject attention, Eytel was subject of a surprising number of newspaper articles in the early 1900s. The essence of Eytel was described as “a unique character [who] might be judged from the fact that he is making a trip from Palm Springs to Los Angeles and El Monte via horseback. One article said that “Mr. Eytel knows the wonderful desert as no other man knows it, for he has made it a life study…. The ‘Desert Artist’ is a prominent figure about Palm Springs and no visitor there feels his stay complete without a glimpse of, and if possible, a chat with him.”

An L.A. Times reporter offered this delightful description of the artist: “I can see him yet, as plainly as though he stood before me. Diminutive in stature, somewhat shrunken, yet vigorous and wiry, with piercing eyes—the eyes of a man accustomed to searching the white vastness of the desert; a heavy mustache, preventing his lips from parching in his travels through the ‘snake lands;’ high cheek bones, deeply bronzed, and sunken cheeks that would give him the appearance of being a consumptive, were it not obvious that he has a remarkably powerful physique and unusual endurance. On the back of his head, seeming as though it must fall off if he moves himself, there is always a broad-brimmed Stetson sombrero, with a rattlesnake-skin band around it, and a large brass buckle. A corduroy suit and dark-blue flannel shirt, open at the neck, and a pair of high boots, constitute his costume; and he never changes it. His hands are thin and bony, and one can always find paint of almost any color on his fingernails.”

An article in 1923 said that Eytel produced no more than ten or twelve paintings in a year. It noted he rarely accepted invitations to display his works, one notable exception being a trip to Los Angeles in 1908 to arrange exhibitions there and in Pasadena. His reluctance for such affairs, “with their concomitants of receptions and pink teas,” came from his feeling that they belong more properly to the “debutant artist.” The writer continued, saying Eytel was “neither enamored of glory, nor desirous of rich emoluments; he works serenely on, moved only by the love of his subject and the joy of expressing it.” The story concludes by saying that Eytel once said he came to the desert to escape the loud world and to find solitude. “That ‘escape’ is expressed in his paintings, rather the spirit of it is there, refined and beautified by the significance that years of companionship with the desert have revealed to the artist.”

Eytel was a friend of the Cahuilla people and they allowed him to be buried in their cemetery in Palm Springs after he died of tuberculosis in Banning, California. His funeral and burial were arranged by Nellie Coffman, who established the original Desert Inn in Palm Springs in 1909.

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