From Women Artists of the Gilded Age: A Retrospective (William Morrow, 2000)
12: Regina Reynolds, née Nellie Doyle (1877–1971)
Oil on canvas, 30×40 inches
Location: California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco
Description/Notes:
This work was painted in 1912, when botanist Alice Eastwood resumed her role as curator of the Botany Department at the California Academy of Sciences after the museum was rebuilt following the earthquake of 1906. The subject (a longtime friend of the artist) wears an old-fashioned black dress and sits at her desk before a glued-down specimen of an orange-petaled Amsinckia eastwoodiae, a vibrant species of California fiddleneck that was eventually named in her honor. She looks straight at the viewer with a wry, humorous expression, her only adornments a lens hanging about her neck on a long chain, and a flowered hat adding a touch of whimsy. The journal open at her elbow is inscribed with a quote by Shakespeare: “In nature’s infinite book of secrecy, a little I can read.”
Oil on canvas, 30×40 inches
Location: de Young Museum, San Francisco
Description/Notes:
An unusually intimate portrait of opera star Gemma Serrano, another longtime friend of Reynolds, depicting the soprano not onstage but in her dressing room. Though she is associated with the San Francisco Opera where she would finish her career in the late twenties, she is depicted here preparing for the famous Teatro Colón production of La Traviata opposite Enrico Caruso in 1917. Costumed lavishly in the courtesan’s white ball gown, the soprano is almost visibly humming through her vocalises as she fixes in her hair a silk Queen of the Night flower (a nod to her most famous role). The scatter of makeup tins, perfume bottles, and opera scores adds a cozy touch, and the overall impression is not one of glamour, but of contentment: the great artist not preening in the spotlight, but focused and happy at her work.
Oil on canvas, 10×20 inches
Location: de Young Museum, San Francisco
Description/Notes:
A delightfully domestic scene depicting fashion designer Feng Suling (the artist’s lifelong partner) at work in her home. She sits at her embroidery frame, head bent over her needle as she works gold and silver thread in the shape of a phoenix—one of the complex embroidered designs that would eventually inspire modern designers like Guo Pei, originally popularized at Callot Soeurs in Paris before Feng opened her own atelier in San Francisco just before World War I. The designer’s bobbed hair is mussed above her embroidered dressing gown, a jade ring dangles on a chain around her neck, and the sunlight glowing on her skin shows the intimate warmth typical of Reynolds’s work. The artist paints herself slyly into this homey tableau: the mirror on the wall beside the embroidery frame reflects the back of an easel, around which a head of dark curls and a paint-smudged arm are just visible.
Charcoal on paper, 8×11 inches
Location: private collection
Description/Notes:
A sketch made in preparation for a future painting, depicting railway tycoon William van Doren in the courtroom where he was tried for murder. The artist’s characteristic attention to detail is seen in the precise depiction of the judge, the spectators, and the jurors—van Doren himself, by contrast, is a crumpled shell of a man outlined in a few savage strokes. Reynolds was called as a witness in the trial, but never testified, as van Doren hanged himself just days into the proceedings. The planned oil portrait of this sketch was either never painted or destroyed by the artist.
Oil on canvas, 40×60 inches
Location: de Young Museum, San Francisco
Description/Notes:
Reynolds is best known for her portraits, ranging from intimate compositions of friends and family to society commissions like the sumptuous 1913 wedding portrait of Mrs. Gilbert Gould née Miss Cecilia Arenburg von Loxen (page 216), but the artist’s portfolio includes several notable landscapes. Chief among them is undoubtedly this colorful depiction of San Francisco’s Chinatown, painted when the artist returned to the city and opened the studio where she would work the rest of her life. The pagoda roofs and dragon streetlamps are rendered in loving detail, reflecting the artist’s lifelong fascination with all things Chinese, and every face along the busy street from the little laundryboy to the sumptuously garbed madam in the doorway is lively, vivid, and individual. Chinatown may have burned in the fires following the 1906 earthquake, but it appears here defiantly rebuilt. Like San Francisco itself, and the men and women who survived that terrible day, it rose again: a phoenix reborn from the ashes.