PBA Galleries

Edith M. Moulton, two original watercolor drawings of Chinatown scenes, ca. 1890. 7 x 9.25” and 7 x 12”, both signed with her initials EMM, one with the remnant of a date, which appears to be 1890 or 1898, when the artist would have been in her 20s.

Edith Moulton was an unmarried young lady of leisure, who had inherited money from her father, a riverboat captain and inventor. She never listed any occupation on her census records, which show only that she lived alone for half a century in her home on Buena Vista Heights. The Hughes Directory of California artists lists her as a painter who exhibited in San Francisco and Oakland in the years before the earthquake; paintings by her dated after the cataclysm have also appeared. While engaged to a young book salesman from Nevada in 1896, the wedding never transpired and she remained single for the rest of her life, traveling around the world alone, twice to the Far East, in 1910 and 1923. These watercolors of Chinatown – a favorite subject for would-be San Francisco artists at the turn of the century – were probably done in her first years as an aspiring painter who never had to sell her work to earn her bread.