Images of Old Hawaiʻi

by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

‘Kakela me Kuke’

In 1837 Samuel Northrup Castle and Amos Starr Cooke landed in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaiʻi,) as part of the 8th Company of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

Neither were missionary ministers. Castle was assigned to the ‘depository’ (a combination store, warehouse and bank) to help the missionaries pool and purchase their supplies, to negotiate shipments around the Horn and to distribute and collect for the goods when received. Cooke was a teacher.

Twelve years after Castle and Cooke had landed in the Islands, the American board decided that its purposes had been accomplished. It advised its representatives that their work was done and the board’s financial support would end.

Over the years Castle, who felt Cooke’s accounting abilities would help the depository, kept trying to convince his friend to join him. Cooke firmly declined until 1849, when his schooling of the royal children was complete. He needed to make a living since monetary support from Missions headquarters had been discontinued.

Castle and Cooke, good friends, decided they would become business partners. Many of the missionaries were planning to remain. Their needs must be met. So those of other residents and the crews of the whaling ships which wintered in Honolulu harbor.

So a business was born. On June 2, 1851, Samuel Northrup Castle and Amos Starr Cooke signed their names to partnership papers. A sign reading ‘Kakela me Kuke’ (‘Castle & Cooke’) was installed at the entrance to the Honolulu depository.

Money could be made by trading with the community at large, while mission posts could be supplied at cost. They took up the matter with the Mission Board in Boston, which, after two years, decided to release the partners from the mission and pay each a yearly salary of $500.

In 1853 a branch store was opened downtown, to be closer to the considerable action the California Gold Rush brought. Also in 1853, Castle and Cooke purchased their first ship, the Morning Star to ship produce to California. By 1856, the partners elected to sell the depository, located on the outskirts of Honolulu, to concentrate on their burgeoning downtown business.

In 1858, Castle and Cooke first ventured out of the mercantile business to make an investment in the new sugar industry. In the late 1860s they branched into the shipping business, handling shore-side business for a number of transpacific schooners and several inter-island vessels.

Despite these diversifications, however, the mercantile portion of the business continued to provide the bulk of the profits. One of the most active customers was Kanaʻina, husband of High Chiefess Kekāuluohi and father of the boy who was to become King Lunalilo.

Then, the Civil War started; goods became hard to get and sales slumped. Then, business with the whalers failed; oil found in Titusville, Pennsylvania replaced whale oil. Castle & Cooke almost went out of business. It was sugar that encouraged the partners to continue their business.

They had generally avoided the policy of investing their firm’s funds in other enterprises, but had bought personally into ventures that attracted them. This often led to relationships producing merchandise and shipping business for the firm and occasionally resulted in its appointment as fiscal agent for a company — as in the case of Kohala Sugar Company.

Kohala Sugar was founded in 1863 by the Rev Elias Bond; he organized the venture to create jobs for the Hawaiians living in Kohala. (It was not until 1910 that Castle & Cooke as a firm acquired an interest in the Kohala Sugar Company, though it had served as its agent for nearly 50 years.)

Then, in 1890, BF Dillingham’s railroad (OR&L,) started with the help of $100,000 invested by Castle, ended at Pearl City. To go further the line needed freight revenues. None were in sight – unless the Ewa land could be made to grow sugar by tapping its underlying fresh water sources to irrigate the crop.

From the organization of Kohala in 1863 until the Ewa lands were leased for sugar in 1890, Castle & Cooke at one time or another served as agent for nine plantations.

On December 28, 1894, the Castle & Cooke partnership was incorporated. The company continued to believe in the profitability of the Ewa Plantation and the risk paid off. In 1898, the original merchandise business was sold.

Diversification did not stop, however. In the ensuing years Castle & Cooke involved itself in an automobile company, the Hawaiian Fertilizer Company, and a big but short venture into the sugar refinery business with the Honolulu Sugar Refining Company.

Although Castle & Cooke had been in the shipping business for 50 years, a 1907 agreement with William Matson to be the agent for his Matson Navigation Company greatly increased the business in this area. The agreement endured for 56 years.

To insure a supply of oil for his ships, Captain Matson bought some wells in California and built a pipeline to the coast. In 1910 he founded the Honolulu Oil Corporation. Castle & Cooke, with other island firms, helped him finance his oil venture.

Pineapple cultivation on a commercial scale began in Hawaii in 1886 when Captain John Kidwell set out a thousand plants in Mānoa valley. By 1909, Castle & Cooke, as agent for Waialua, had negotiated leases of over 3,000 acres of the plantation’s upper lands to James D Dole and other growers for pineapple plantings.

Castle & Cooke had no substantial direct investment in the pineapple industry until 1932 when Hawaiian Pineapple Company (later Dole) encountered financial trouble. In that year Castle & Cooke and Waialua jointly under wrote the reorganization of the pineapple company and for a few years thereafter, Castle & Cooke served as its agent and took over the operations.

Castle & Cooke recognized the need for diversification which led to investment in tuna canning (Hawaiian Tuna Packers, 1946) and macadamia nuts (Royal Hawaiian Macadamia Nuts, 1948.)

For a time in the 1960s, Castle & Cooke were the biggest of the Big Five (C Brewer (1826;) Theo H. Davies (1845;) Amfac – starting as Hackfeld & Company (1849;) Castle & Cooke (1851) and Alexander & Baldwin (1870;)) however, Amfac later outpaced it.

Later, the company was the subject of several takeover bids; ultimately, David Murdock took firm control of Castle & Cooke (1985,) reorganized it into a holding company for three separate operations: Flexi-Van, Dole Food and Oceanic Properties, and relocated its headquarters to Los Angeles. (Lots of information is from Castle & Cooke, Greaney and FundingUniverse.)

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by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Hotel Del Coronado

Hotel founders, Elisha Babcock, Jr., and Hampton L. Story, along with San Diego developer Alonzo Horton walked along the Coronado beach in 1886.

Although neither Babcock nor Story had experience in the hotel business, they were so inspired by the natural beauty of Coronado that they decided to buy the island and build a magnificent hotel, one that would be “the talk of the western world,” an iconic California destination where “people will continue to come long after we are gone.”

They subsequently purchased about 4,000 acres of land around the Coronado Peninsula and the neighboring North Island in order to create a resort community that would service the new hotel. (Historic Hotels)

They first created the Coronado Beach Company, after which they established a number of additional enterprises to support the development of the Coronado community (a ferry company, water company, railroad company and an electrical power plant).

As soon as a site was chosen for the historic Hotel Del Coronado, the men laid out Coronado’s parks, civic areas, commercial zones and streets (Isabella and Adella avenues were named for the founders’ wives).

Once the town of Coronado was established, it was time to attract residents, so Babcock and Story held a very well-publicized land auction, which attracted a reported 6,000 people. 350 lots were sold during the auction, raising about $100,000. By June 10, 1887, Coronado lot sales had reached the $1.5 million mark. The grand total would eventually reach $2.25 million. (Hotel Del Coronado)

“Orange avenue is the name of one of the wide and elegant thoroughfares at Coronado Beach, the ferry to which locality is now in operation. The sea beach is over there is very fine, in which surf bathers can dip for many miles … Lots, which are large, can be bought at reasonable rates now, and more houses will soon be under way.” (Daily San Diegan, Feb 22, 1886)

The Coronado Beach Company are about to erect a mammoth hotel of five hundred rooms, and on the mesa a palace hotel of some three hundred rooms is projected.” (Daily San Diegan, Jan 4, 1887)

“The first shovelful of earth for the excavation for the foundation of the Coronado hotel was cast by Mrs ES Babcock, yesterday. The work will now proceed as rapidly as possible.” (Daily San Diegan, Jan 13, 1887)

By May 1887, approximately 250 men were employed in the construction of the exciting new destination beach resort, and The San Diego Union reported: “A million feet of lumber is scattered about the yard, and more is coming all the time.”

The all-wooden Hotel del Coronado used a variety of lumber: Douglas fir for framing and California redwood for exterior siding; hemlock, cedar, white oak, and Oregon sugar pine were also used. (Hotel Del Coronado)

Although guests began arriving as early as late January 1888, Hotel del Coronado’s birthday has generally been celebrated on February 19 – the day the historic Southern California hotel served its first meal in the main dining room (today’s Crown Room).

Room rates – which included three meals a day – started at about $2.50 per day. The hotel was built at a cost of $600,000 and furnished for $400,000. (Hotel Del Coronado)

Known affectionately as “The Del” by its many countless guests, the legendary Hotel del Coronado harkens back to the height of America’s Gilded Age.

Hawai‘i Connection to the Hotel Del Coronado

In 1876, son of wealthy “Sugar King” Claus Spreckels, John Dietrich Spreckels (sometimes called the Sugar Prince) went to the Hawaiian Islands, where he worked in his father’s sugar business.  

He loved sailing, and owned both personal shipliners and boats. Apart from being the Sugar Prince, Spreckels also became known as “Seadog.” In 1880, the Sugar Prince’s legacy grew to incorporate more than just the sugar industry.

Given his passion for sailing, Spreckels then established his own shipping enterprise in 1880, the Oceanic Steamship Company, operating a mail and passenger line to Hawaii and Australia.

In 1887, Spreckels visited San Diego on his yacht Lurline to stock up on supplies.  (Nearly forty years earlier (1850,) Honolulu-born William Heath “Kanaka” Davis, Jr. (1822 – 1909) had arrived in this part of California.

Davis purchased 160-acres of land and, with four partners, laid out a new city (near what is now the foot of Market Street.)  He built the first wharf there in 1850.) (Part of the interest in and growth of San Diego may also be attributed to when a terminus of a transcontinental line was made in 1885.)

When the Hotel Del Coronado was under construction; Spreckels, fell in love with it and provided generous loans and other assistance to the resort’s founders, Babcock and Story, in order to keep the dream alive.

“You have often heard the remark that San Diego is a one-man town. Personally, I feel proud to live in San Diego when it is referred to as a one-man town … this afternoon you can’t give our great leader enough glory.” (Mayor Wilde remarks of Spreckels, November 15, 1919; San Diego History))

Spreckels became an investor in the Coronado Beach Company in 1889, buying out Hampton L.Story’s one-third interest and over the next three years bought controlling interest in the company and became the sole proprietor of the Hotel del Coronado. (Coronado History)

He established Tent City, a large vacation campground that sprung up near Hotel del Coronado.  Tent City grew quickly – from 300 tents in the first year to more than 1,000 three years later, and attracted visitors from across the nation as an affordable vacation alternative.

“To be candid, I did not entirely fancy the idea at first, and then for a time I was doubtful of the success of the place. I was somewhat of the opinion that it might detract from the popularity of the resort proper and the hotel,” Spreckels said in a 1903 interview. “But Tent City has … established itself as firmly in my favor as in that of the public.”  (San Diego Union Tribune)

An early getaway brochure described the accommodations: “A furnished tent comprises electric lights, matting on boarded floor, comfortable beds and cots, bedding, wash-stand, mirror, tables, chairs, rockers, camp-chairs and stools, necessary cooking utensils, clean linen, daily care of tent, and laundry service of tent linen.”

Tent City also featured restaurants, a soda fountain, library, grocery store, shops, a small hotel (the Arcade), theatre, bandstand, dance pavilion, merry-go-round, shooting gallery, swimming floats (one with a high-diving board), its own police department, and daily newspaper. (Hotel Del Coronado)

In 1904, The Del – already considered a technological marvel – made history when it unveiled the world’s first electrically lit, outdoor, living Christmas tree. Holiday lights were strung from the hotel to a nearby Norfolk Island Pine. Although indoor trees were popular in America by this time, electric Christmas lights were a rarity (candles were still commonplace).

Spreckels died in San Diego on June 7, 1926. His biographer, Austin Adams, called him “one of America’s few great Empire Builders who invested millions to turn a struggling, bankrupt village into the beautiful and cosmopolitan city San Diego is today.”  (San Diego History Center)

Coronado is also home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, and Silver Strand Training Complex, supported by nearly 20,000 military and civilian personnel.

In 1969, the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge was completed and made Coronado Island and Hotel del Coronado much more accessible. (Lots of information here is from Hotel Del Coronado, San Diego History Center, Coronado CA, and Coronado History)

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by Peter T Young 3 Comments

‘Aim High to Reach the Heaven’

“Hawaiian Birdman Wins His Pilot License.”

“There will soon be a new sound to mingle with the music of the plaintive ukuleles in Hawaiʻi. It will be the roar of an aeroplane motor, for Hawaiʻi now has its first and only aviator”.

“(H)e made his ‘solo’ flight (on October 2, 1916) for his official pilot’s license, which is issued by the Aero Club of America. The flight was successfully executed in every respect and he was given his diploma.” (Pilot Certificate Granted: No. 600) (Buffalo Evening News; Star Bulletin, October 20, 1916)

He “travelled 6,000-miles from Honolulu to make the necessary solo flight at the Curtiss training field, Buffalo, NY, recently. His name is Sen Yet Young.” (He was also known as Yang Xianyi.)

Born in the Islands (1891,) he studied and graduated from ʻIolani School and received his higher education at College of Hawaiʻi (later named University of Hawaiʻi) and Harry University of California, majoring in mechanical engineering.

After his graduation, he was enrolled at the Curtiss Aviation School in New York for further study of aircraft manufacturing and driving skills and got the pilot’s license (for land and seaplane.) (Zhongshan Municipal Government)

“As the only Hawaiian who has mastered the art of flight, he remained to study the mechanics of the aeroplane at the Curtiss factory, before returning to Honolulu, where he will have to act as his own mechanician.” (Popular Mechanics, February 1917)

“Air Pilot Young’s father (Yang Zhukun (aka Young Jeu Kwun & Young Ahin)) is the owner of a fish farm that is one of the attractions for visitors at Honolulu. He grows all sorts of fish that are common to those visitors. He also has 4 large sugar plantations and deals in real estate.”

“If there is one thing that Mr Young takes more pride in than his flying school diploma – which he traveled more than 6,000 miles to get, it is the fact that he is an American citizen.” (Buffalo Evening News; Star Bulleting, October 20, 1916)

While proud of his accomplishment of becoming Hawaiʻi’s first licensed flyer, it was subsequent actions that earned Sen Yet Young even higher honors.

Young’s father was a friend of Sun Yat-sen. As a youth, Young listened to Sun Yat-sen talk about the revolution in China and was impressed and decided to join. (Lum)

After a successful coup in 1911, Sun Yat-sen served as the provisional president of the Republic of China (January 1, 1912.) With varying changes in leadership, Sun Yat-sen and others sought national unity which could only be brought about by the abolishment of warlordism.

Shortly after attaining his pilot’s license, Sen Yet Young went to China and joined the Revolutionary Alliance.

In the revolutionary cause of overthrowing the Qing dynasty, Sun Yat-sen saw that the aircraft would become a new type of military weapon and be greatly helpful to the nation’s revolution. Seeing the lack of effective weapons, Sun Yat-sen coined the phrase, ‘Aviation saves the nation.’ (Pike)

In 1917, Sen Yet Young organized the airplane fleet, and went back to Guangzhou to support the campaign to protect the republic. He was appointed Captain of the airplane fleet by Sun Yat-sen.

A landmark event during this campaign was the first use of military air power by the fledgling Guangdong Air Force. On the night of the Mid-autumn Festival (September 26) in 1920, Sen Yet Young and another flew two planes over the warlord headquarters in Guangzhou and released three crude bombs.

The display of air power played a role in hastening warlord departure from Guangzhou by early October. As the warlord’s army retreated westward, Sun supporters pressed their air superiority by strafing from above.

Young later went to Hawaiʻi and the continental US to raise funds from the overseas Chinese and purchased 12 airplanes, including 4 donated by his father. He also actively campaigned for the Kuomintang and raised funds for flying lessons for the young Chinese he recruited. (Lai)

In December, he was commissioned by Sun Yat-sen as Head of Aviation Bureau and also the director of Guangdong Aircraft Manufactory in Guangzhou.

On July 1923, the factory made China’s first self-designed military airplane, named “Rosamonde,” after Sun Yat-sen’s wife’s (Soong Ching Ling) English name. (Zhongshan Municipal Government)

Sen Yet Young, with Chinese-built and foreign-built airplanes, helped the Nationalist government beat the warlords in the Kwantung province.

In order to destroy the Huizhou City Wall, he went to Meihu of Boluo to check bomb facilities, and died September 20, 1923 from an accidental explosion at the age of 32. (Zhongshan Municipal Government) The Kuomintang government later designated that date as Air Force Day. (Lai)

Sun Yat-sen (also known as Sun Wen) conferred on him posthumously the rank of general and also wrote a scroll, “To the family members of Yang Xian-yi; Aim High to Reach the Heaven; Sun Wen” (Lum)

Young (Yang Xianyi) is buried at Huanghuagang Mausoleum to commemorate the 72 martyrs who died in Guangzhou uprising on April 27, 1911. (It was later determined that there were 86 martyrs, including 30 who were overseas Chinese, including Yang Xianyi.) (72 Martyrs)

Sun Yat-sen called him, the ‘Father of China’s air force.’ (Lum) A middle school was named after him, the Xianyi Middle School, which was renamed No 2 Middle School during the “cultural revolution.” In 1980 the school won back its original name and Young’s son came over from the US to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony. (China Daily)

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by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Presidents’ Day

Only two Americans have been honored with individual federal holidays. The original intent was to recognize them on their birthdays.

Washington’s birthday holiday came about seventy years after his death. Martin Luther King died in 1968; King’s birthday was approved as a federal holiday in 1983, and all 50 states made it a state government holiday by 2000.

George Washington, the country’s first president, was born February 22, 1732 (Gregorian). He served as president from April 30, 1789 to March 4, 1797.

On January 31, 1879, the US House and Senate enacted a law authorizing February 22 as a legal holiday within the District of Columbia.  In 1885, they made February 22 a paid holiday for federal workers.

Washington’s Birthday was celebrated on February 22 from 1879 until 1971.  By 1890, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday was observed as a paid holiday in 10 states (in 1940, 24 states and the District of Columbia observed Lincoln’s Birthday), however it never officially became a federal holiday.

In 1951, a Californian named Harold Stonebridge Fischer formed the President’s Day National Committee with the intention of creating a holiday that would honor the office of the presidency, but no particular president.

He lobbied Congress, proposing March 4, the original Inauguration Day, as the date for “Presidents’ Day,” but the bill to make it happen became stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee. (American Spectator)

Adopted in 1968 and effective January 1, 1971, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act that moved certain federal holidays dates – Washington’s Birthday was moved to the third Monday in February.

There was debate on changing the holiday name to ‘Presidents’ Day’.  An early draft of the enabling bill would have renamed the Washington’s Birthday holiday “Presidents’ Day” to honor both Washington and Lincoln, whose birthday is on February 12 and has never been a national holiday. (American Spectator)

Opponents were not convinced. It had been Illinois Representative Robert McClory – a representative from “the land of Lincoln” – who had attempted in committee to rename “Washington’s Birthday” as “President’s Day.” The bill stalled.

The Wall Street Journal reported: “To win more support, Mr. McClory and his allies dropped the earlier goal of renaming Washington’s Birthday [as] Presidents’ Day, [which] mollified some Virginia lawmakers. He also agreed to sweeten the package by including Columbus Day as a Federal holiday, a goal sought for years by Italian-American groups.”

“It was the collective judgment of the Committee on the Judiciary,” stated Mr. William Moore McCulloch (Ohio) “that this [naming the day “President’s Day”] would be unwise. Certainly, not all Presidents are held in the same high esteem as the Father of our Country.”

“There are many who are not inclined to pay their respects to certain Presidents. Moreover, it is probable that the members of one political party would not relish honoring a President from the other political party whether he was in office, no matter how outstanding history may find his leadership.” (Archives-gov)

President Richard Nixon did not, as a widely circulated Internet story claims, issue a proclamation changing the holiday’s name from Washington’s Birthday to Presidents’ Day. His Executive Order 115 on February 10, 1971, merely announced the new federal holiday calendar, as passed by Congress in 1968.  (Archives-gov)

According to Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives, it was a local department-store promotion that went national when retailers discovered that, mysteriously, generic Presidents clear more inventory than particular ones, even the Father of His Country. Now everybody thinks it’s official, but it’s not. (The New Yorker)

So, while we celebrate “Presidents’ Day.” it really isn’t officially called that (at least at the national legislative level).

The Uniform Monday Holiday Act is still in effect – and is officially (federally) “Washington’s Birthday.”  (Some States (including Hawai‘i) refer to it as “Presidents’ Day” and it is a State and Federal holiday.)

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by Peter T Young 2 Comments

Louis Henri Jean Charlot

Born in Paris, Louis Henri Jean Charlot was descended from “sundry exotic ancestors.” His father, Henri, was a French businessman, free-thinker and Bolshevik sympathizer born and reared in Russia. Anna, his mother, an artist and a devout Catholic, was the daughter of Louis Goupil, a native of Mexico City.

Goupil, of French and Mexican Indian stock, married Sarah Louise (Luisita) Melendez, a Jewish woman of Spanish descent and subsequently moved from Mexico to Paris in the late 1860s. (Thompson)

Charlot admiringly describes his maternal grandfather in his earlier years as “… a fine rider, a coleador who could hold a running bull by passing its tail between his knee and the saddle of his galloping horse”.

Also living in Paris was Jean Charlot’s great-uncle, Eugène Goupil, a collector of Mexican works of art. Jean, who began to draw around age two, grew up surrounded by pre-Hispanic antiquities. (Thompson)

In his teens, Charlot had become one of a Catholic group that called itself Gilde Notre-Dame (“Parisian adolescents (who) used to gather in a crypt”) made up of sculptors, stained glass makers, embroiderers and decorators.

The resumption after the war of what Charlot calls his “career as a French liturgical artist” was cut short by the cancellation of the commission for the church mural just after he had completed the scale drawings.

This “first heartbreak at the realization that a born mural painter is helpless without a wall ….” was one of the factors that precipitated a journey to Mexico in 1920. “On this first trip to Mexico I did nothing at all. I was stuck aesthetically in 18th century France.” (Thompson)

“My life in France was on the whole rational, national, obeying this often heard dictum that a Frenchman is a man who ignores geography. There were though, simultaneously, un-French elements at work. Russian, sephardim, Aztec ancestors, warmed my blood to adventure.” (Charlot; Thompson)

After this Mexican trip, in 1928, Charlot and his mother moved to New York where he rented a small apartment on the top floor of 42 Union Square from the artist Morris Kantor. The apartment was unheated, which probably contributed to the death of his mother from pneumonia in January, 1929.

On a brief trip to Mexico in 1931, Charlot met his future wife, Dorothy Zohmah Day. During a visit to Zohmah in Los Angeles in 1933, Charlot met the printer Lynton R Kistler and produced Picture Book, “a repertory of motifs I had used up to then.” Returning to New York, teaching and lecturing occupied much of Charlot’s time.

In May 1939, Jean Charlot and Zohmah Day were married in San Francisco. “It was a long courtship,” commented Charlot. “Eight years. We were always in different places”.

The years from 1941-44 were spent as artist-in-residence at the University of Georgia, Athens, and instructor in art history at the University of California, Berkeley and artist-in-residence at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. (Thompson)

Then he had a chance to come to Hawaiʻi – and he stayed. An invitation to create a fresco at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, brought Charlot to Honolulu in 1949 where he painted Relation of Man and Nature in Old Hawai’i at Bachman Hall.

He accepted a position as professor of art at the University, and Hawai’i became the Charlot family’s permanent home. Attracted to the culture of the native Hawaiian, just as he had been interested in the folk aspects of the residents of rural France and the indigenous peoples of Mexico, he studied Hawaiian history, customs and religion, and learned the Hawaiian language.

From 1949 to 1979 Charlot created almost six hundred easel paintings, several hundred prints, and thirty-six works of art in public places in fresco, ceramic tile and sculpture. He taught summer sessions at several schools, among them San Diego State College (1950), Arizona State University (1951) and the University of Notre Dame (1955 and 1956). In 1950 he was made faculty advisor to the Newman Club, the Catholic student organization of the University of Hawai’i. (Thompson)

Charlot retired from the University of Hawai’i as Senior Professor Emeritus in 1966. Two years later, he traveled to France for the first time since 1921 and, at Malzéville and Paris, created a series of lithographs.

In 1968 the Jean Charlot Foundation was established in Honolulu to collect source materials relating to the life, work, art, philosophy, and values of Jean Charlot and promote publication of Charlot material – and, the “development of interest in the arts, encouragement of artists, and study of art.” (Thompson)

There are very few artists of Jean Charlot’s caliber in Hawaiʻi or the world. From 1958 until his death, Jean Charlot lived in Hawaiʻi in his ‘dream house’ on Wai’alae Country Club. Here, he conducted most of his work in this house and more particularly in his 2nd floor studio.

This was the final period of Charlot’s life, when he reached the peak of his artistic powers and was able to synthesize the esthetics of Europe, Mexico and Pacific Islands, the places he lived and influenced his art. His career spanned these places.

He was an early participant in the revival of liturgical art in France. He was a pioneer of the Mexican Mural Renaissance. He also worked as an archaeologist, moving to Washington D.C. to complete the publication of the report of the Carnegie Institution’s Chichen Itza expedition.

He completed numerous monumental art works in Hawaiʻi, Fiji and elsewhere. His artwork in public places number 74 in his lifetime, over 30 planned in the house, including the large ceramic tile mural on the School Street facade of the United Public Workers Building in Honolulu.

Jean Charlot was primarily a muralist and was also a prolific writer, producing numerous scholarly books and articles along with poetry and drama. He also illustrated over 50 books. Many works and scholarly resources are now housed in the Jean Charlot Collection of the Hamilton Library, University of Hawaiʻi. (NPS)

Among the honors bestowed on Charlot was the election by the Royal Society of Art, London, as a Benjamin Franklin Fellow in 1972. In 1976, the Hawai’i State Legislature presented Charlot with the Order of Distinction for Cultural Leadership. As well as being recognized as a ‘Living Treasure’ by Honpa Hongwanji Mission.

In 1974, Charlot was diagnosed as having cancer of the prostate. Radiation treatments and chemotherapy would keep the disease under control for the next four years. Confined to a wheelchair during the last months of his life, Charlot remained active as an artist and a scholar until his death on March 20, 1979. (Thompson)

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