Gutzon, however, was not long friendless. He appears to have been discovered by George Butler Griffin, who had married a Castilian lady from Colombia and lived in Los Angeles. They had several gifted children, one of whom was the mother of the actress, Bebe Daniels. Another daughter, Mrs. Eva Griffin Turner, herself a painter, was among Gutzon’s early heralds. She met him first in the eighties and never forgot a detail of their meeting.
She was twelve years old at the time and for a year or more had been sketching and painting in her own fashion with a child’s color box. She was allowed to trail along with him and a class he was instructing, and she never forgot what he said as the pupils gazed at a sunset beyond Los Angeles.
“The artist,” he declared—and it seemed to her that he was talking to himself—“The artist should approach nature with great reverence.”
He left the class for a while when he went to work with William Keith, an artist in San Francisco. Gutzon was an extravagant admirer of Keith, who was called the “Grand Old Man of California Painting.” He stayed in his class for several months. During that same period he took a short course under Virgil Williams.
Mrs. Turner vividly remembered his home-coming and how his old students reassembled with him for outdoor sketching. But he was not long for his old ways. He had painted a picture called “Stage Coach” and some rich man had seen it. There was an immediate furor over the picture and Gutzon. And so presently he went to Paris to study.
“He won prizes,” Mrs. Turner mentioned, “and he was greatly admired.”