A case of tuberculosis seems to have been the artistic making of Albert Marshall. Growing up in Lindsay, a San Joaquin Valley farming area known for its olive groves, Marshall must have had few opportunities to experience art. Yet his natural inclinations led him to sketch in the margins of his schoolbooks. After high school he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, then California’s most important art school, where he supported himself as a lamplighter.

At the outbreak of World War I, he tried to enlist but was diagnosed with tuberculosis. After spending years in bed, he was advised to go live in the mountains. Marshall moved to Giant Forest, around the Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevadas, where he ultimately set up a studio. In the 1930’s his search for dry air led him to settle in La Crescenta, just north of Los Angeles. But in 1942, when an orange grove he owned began to produce, he and his family retired to Three Rivers, just east of Visalia, where he built a hilltop adobe home. His painting forays took in the desert in the winters and the Sierras Nevada, Alaska, and Vermont in the summers.

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Source: Art at the Jonathan Club, Jonathan Art Foundation