James Edwin McBurney American California Artist Mural Study Oil Painting Signed. Oil on Canvas study for a mural; one of the panels showing the first settlements of the United States; Father Serra at San Diego by J.E. McBurney; possibly initialed lower left; 10 x 14
A painter, illustrator and muralist, James McBurney was born in Lore City, Ohio. He studied in New York at the Pratt Institute and with John Twachtmann and Charles Davis, and in Philadelphia at the Drexel Institute and the Brandywine School of Art with Howard Pyle. He then went to Paris where he enrolled in the Academies Colarossi and Castelucho.From 1901 to 1913, he was in Los Angeles where he gave private lessons and taught at a local highschool. One of his students was California artist Mable Alvarez. He also conducted art classes at Laguna Beach, which along with other artists' summer classes helped develop the art colony at Laguna Beach. He was also a muralist in the 1915 Pan American Exposition in San Francisco. In 1919, he left California to teach briefly at the A.E.F. University in Beaune, France, and then went to Chicago, where he had an opportunity to paint murals. Working there until his death on March 2, 1955, he founded an art school, was Art Director for the Chicago Art District and for the City Parks and Recreation, and was active in the WPA Mural projects that have been rediscovered and are being restored in recent years in Chicago. In Chicago, his murals are in the Palmer Park Field House, Woodlawn National Bank, Parkside School, Wentworth School, Scott School, and Tilden Technical School. Murals are also at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and the State Agricultural Expo Building in Dubuque, Iowa. Affiliations included the California Art Club and the Cliff Dwellers in Chicago. He exhibited with the Pan-Pacific Exposition in 1915 in San Francisco.

10 x 14 in