Elizabeth Eaton Burton, one of California’s most creative period designers and coppersmiths, was born in Paris in 1869. Aside from drawing, she had no formal training in the arts but naturally inherited the artistry of her father, Charles F. Eaton, and worked in the same mediums. In December, 1896, Elizabeth opened her first art studio on the corner of Arlington Avenue and State Street in Santa Barbara; it featured her work in shell, metal, and leather decorative objects.
By 1901, she had exhibited in New York and California, quickly gaining attention with her unique woodcuts, watercolors, bookbindings, tooled leather décor, screens, lamps, and stained glass – much of with a strong Japonic/Asian influence. Gustav Stickley paid the Eatons a visit in 1904 and profiled their work and gardens in The Craftsman.
In 1905, Elizabeth was granted a patent for her ornamental leatherwork, for which she applied in 1900. (She had sold her work in New York for several years, where it proved so popular that other artists copied her designs). In 1909, Burton received her first medal at the Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition in Seattle. She then opened a studio in Los Angeles, which she kept open until approximately 1924; she spent the next several years traveling through Europe, studying modern design and exhibiting her works there. She died in Los Angeles in 1937.
The Santa Barbara-based Charles Eaton and his daughter, Elizabeth Eaton Burton, were among the lucky craftspeople to get recognition from Gustav Stickley himself, when he chose to profile them in the pages of his well-circulated and respected magazine, The Craftsman. In a July, 1904 article, Stickley espouses the “regional conditions” of California that have given rise to a distinct style in both architecture and decorative arts and singles out the Eatons as emblematic of this style:
“My surprise and pleasure. . . were consequently much increased when I reached the home of Mr. Charles Frederick Eaton, in the suburbs of Santa Barbara (Montecito) : a spot where the intentions of Nature, instead of being thwarted, have been studied and developed with most gratifying results.”
New England-born Charles Eaton was an architect and landscape gardener; Stickley goes to great lengths to describe Eaton’s study of horticulture and arboriculture, his travels to the great formal gardens in Italy and the French Riviera, and his subsequent Montecito gardens – all, Stickley notes, important influences in Eaton’s embrace of “the simple” and his stance firmly “in the presence of Nature” when he sets out to create “peculiar objects of household decoration.”
In the article, Charles discusses his evolution as a gardener: When I began my work here in Montecito, I arranged my lawn in geometrical flower-beds, and soon I had an Italian garden. I saw my error quickly. My effects were too formal and artificial. I was misapprehending Nature, repressing her and following the example of those whom I had sharply criticized. As a measure of reform, I removed the beds: resolving for the future to control Nature but never to resist her. From this resolution I have never since swerved. The present beauty of the estate results from the fact that it has never been subjected to the tortures of a formal gardener’s methods.” (pg 378)
Stickley, regarding Elizabeth, who was also known for her beautiful leather-work:
Possessed of the sense of her art to a high degree, she never confounds the decorative with the pictorial, and to attain her effects, she reaches out for material in all legitimate directions. Her Shell work: “gives an opalescent effect softer than that of jeweled glass.”
Source: Gustav Stickley,”Nature and Art in California.” The Craftsman, July 1904.
Nov. 2011: Added to our Shop – we were able to pick up a limited amount of the book, “Elizabeth Eaton Burton: My Santa Barbara Scrap Book” – get your copy before these are gone!