Medical Arts

Who Was Eugene Perrot and
Why Did He Paint this Picture?

By Jeremy Dwight Nichols

For the past two years, I have been studying the history of the Sonoma County Poor Farm and Hospital (1874—1937) for a planned book on the poor farm, hospital, and adjacent cemetery, now renamed the Chanate Historic Cemetery. While researching the book last September, I discovered an oil painting in the basement of Sutter Hospital. It showed the old Sonoma County Hospital, a beautiful white building constructed along the lines of a southern mansion (see cover). Although photographs of the building survive, the painting is the only known color image of the old hospital, which was demolished around 1960. The site is now occupied by county offices and the Bird Rescue Center.

Sadly, the painting bore the dirt and damage of many years. When I expressed interest in raising funds for a restoration, staff members at Sutter were kind enough to let me take the painting to show potential donors.

As found, the painting appeared to be unsigned, but by using advanced digital techniques, I was able to reveal a signature and date. Research has since revealed who the artist was and how he came to paint this picture.

Antoine Eugene Pierrot (who later changed his name to Eugene Perrot) was born in France in 1823 and emigrated to the United States with his parents and four siblings. The family arrived in Philadelphia in 1850 and went from there to Texas, where they settled on a farm northeast of Houston. In 1854, Eugene and his father, Anthony, filed Declarations of Intention to become citizens of the United States. By 1860, they were the owners of land, cattle, and slaves.

The Pierrot family must have loved their adopted state of Texas, for all three sons enlisted in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Eugene was so eager to fight that he joined a cavalry company in 1860. When war was declared in 1861, he enlisted in Company F of the Fourth Texas Mounted Volunteers and served until the final surrender in 1865.

The war was costly for the Pierrot family. Eugene was injured, one of his brothers was killed, and the farm was lost. Eugene, who may have had some education in France, then turned to painting to make a living. He soon got married and moved to Dallas.

In the days before popular photography, frontier areas had no one to record images of people or places. Itinerant painters called “limners” traveled from town to town, settled in a local hotel, and offered their services to the rising middle class. (The word limner is not pejorative: derived from the same Latin root that gives us illuminate, it simply means “portrait painter.”) Limners also painted landscapes and signs, decorated furniture, and did anything else they could to make a living. One of Eugene’s money-making efforts was to form a school in Dallas, offering classes in painting, drawing, and penmanship, as well as French and German.

During the winter, when muddy roads made travel difficult, limners would work in the studio, painting dozens of “blank” portraits of generic male and female bodies with no heads. After drying, these canvases were rolled up and packed away in trunks to await the summer travel season. The generic bodies reduced the time needed to produce a finished portrait and made the paintings less expensive, thus increasing the chance of a sale.

Two portraits by Eugene are known to exist. Both of them—of a Mr. and Mrs. Jennings—hang in the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Painted in 1877, they are the first portraits known to be done in that city, and they are signed “Pierrot.”

The success of Eugene’s school is unknown, but by 1880, now a widower, he was on the road again. Sometime after 1890, he changed the spelling of his last name to “Perrot” and signed it that way for the rest of his life. By 1890, he had moved to San Diego, and a few years after that, to Sonoma County.

From 1894 to 1904, Melville McVitty Shearer, MD, was the Sonoma County Physician, responsible for administering the County Hospital. He was a respected doctor, a former military surgeon, and a literate man. During his tenure, the otherwise dry monthly reports from the hospital to the Board of Supervisors were spiced up with humorous comments and even quotations from Shakespeare. In January 1898, for example, Shearer described the Pest House (i.e., smallpox isolation building) at the hospital with two lines from Romeo and Juliet, perhaps alluding to the disease’s scars:

Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.

Shearer started a library at the hospital and planted fruit trees to beautify the grounds. Such a man might also have had an interest in art, especially art with himself as the object. Indeed, Perrot’s painting is not so much a landscape of the hospital but rather a portrait of the man in the buggy (Dr. Shearer), with the hospital as background.

How Shearer met Perrot is unknown. Perhaps Perrot came to the hospital for treatment, or perhaps the doctor saw his paintings somewhere. In any case, Shearer almost certainly commissioned the painting, paid for it himself, and left it in the hospital when he resigned, shortly before his death in 1905. His probate record, on file in Sonoma County, lists all of his personal possessions, even his “skeleton and case.” The painting, however, was not mentioned, so ownership rests with the People of Sonoma County.

The building in the painting was the third county medical facility to be erected in Santa Rosa. Since 1855, California counties have been required to provide free medical care to residents who cannot afford to pay. The first (1859) public health facility in Santa Rosa (one hates to call it a “hospital”) was a room over the jail at Fourth and B streets. The next facility, the first “real” hospital, was built on Humboldt Street in 1866. As the city grew around the hospital, citizens complained about the risk of disease, forcing the local authorities to consider a new location. In 1887, the county built a new hospital far out of town on the grounds of the County Poor Farm, across Chanate Road from today’s Sutter Hospital.

Perrot’s painting accurately depicts the hospital with its red roof, white walls, and green window coverings. On the right is the windmill and well; water was a continuing problem at the hospital and farm. The man in the buggy is Dr. Shearer, as can be seen by comparing the doctor’s image in the painting to his photograph in the 1897 Sonoma County Atlas.

The painting, which is oil on canvas, measures 22 by 27 inches. The current frame was purchased from Breuners in Santa Rosa about 1950 and still has the store’s sticker on the back. According to the art historian Terrence Cline, the horse in the painting was probably copied from a Currier and Ives lithograph because the people, fences, buildings, and streets are not handled as well. Cline also thinks Perrot was most likely a self-taught painter because of his composition and perspective errors, and because his colors are mixed with lots of black for shading.

Dennis Calabi, a respected conservator, examined the painting and found that the canvas is weak and brittle, the paint is cracking severely, the surface is dull and grimy, the varnish is discolored, and numerous accretions (such as flyspecks) are in evidence.

For the time being, the painting is hanging in the lobby of the Sonoma County Museum at 425 Seventh Street in Santa Rosa. It can also be viewed on the Historical Society’s website at www.sonomacountyhistory.org. Because of the historic value of the painting, the Historical Society is raising funds to preserve it.

Treating an old painting can consist of “conservation,” which attempts to halt further deterioration, and “restoration,” which attempts to make the painting look as it originally did. The work proposed by the Historical Society is primarily conservation. The treatment is quite complex, involving a complete cleaning, repairing, remounting, and revarnishing process that will take six to eight weeks of work over the course of a year.

The quoted cost of conserving the painting is $2,200, of which the Historical Society has already received $1,300. An additional unknown amount, perhaps $500, will be needed to locate and purchase a historically appropriate frame.

The Historical Society invites the medical community to help preserve this important record of Sonoma County’s medical history. Contributions may be sent to:

Painting Restoration Fund
Sonoma County Historical Society
PO Box 1373
Santa Rosa, CA 95402

The Historical Society is an IRS 501(c)(3) organization. Contributions are tax-
deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Sonoma Medicine, Volume 56, Number 2 (Spring 2005).