IN THE NEWS: Esther Bruton's "The Hunt"

The Hunt
Terrazzo fireplace surround by Esther Bruton, ca. late 1940s

Quite unexpectedly, Esther Bruton created a splash in the news last week.  Her terrazzo fireplace surround, The Hunt, was on display at the Salon Art + Design Expo held in the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan from November 14-18. According to their website, the Salon Art + Design Expo exhibits "the world’s best design – vintage, modern and contemporary – enhanced by blue-chip 20th century and contemporary art." It was quite a surprise to learn that a work by Esther Bruton was the centerpiece of a spectacular installation by New York interior designer Liz O’Brien (see photo below).  

Photo by Peter Baker.  Image courtesy Liz O’Brien.

Even more exciting, Esther's fireplace has been creating a lot of buzz -- Architectural Digest identified it as one of the "eight standouts" at the show. (You can read the article here: 8 Salon Art + Design 2019 Standouts) The website The Cut also praised the piece; in her article Magical Thinking at the Park Avenue Armory, author Wendy Goodman wrote: 

"...when I asked [Liz O'Brien] about the fireplace in her exhibition space, I learned about another artist I’d never heard of. “The terrazzo panels are by Esther Bruton of San Francisco,” said Liz. “She and her two sisters were well-known artists in the Bay Area, particularly Monterey and Pebble Beach. They came up at auction in Texas, and we asked Stephen Antonson to build a surround so we could exhibit them — I think he knocked it out of the park.” (thecut.com, 21 Nov. 2019)

It's thrilling that Esther's work from seventy years ago is continuing to excite today's artists and designers. But what about the history of the piece? The first mention of the fireplace surround is in a catalog for the Bruton sisters’ 1949 "Exhibition of Mosaics" at Gump Galleries in San Francisco.  The photo below is from the exhibition catalog, and shows a portion of Esther's work with the title The Hunt.  

From a catalog for the Brutons' Exhibition of Mosaics at Gump Galleries, Sept. 7-30, 1949.

The work received some notoriety early on; it was exhibited at the American Institute of Decorators' 1953 spring exhibition and also appeared in the October 1953 issue of House Beautiful magazine. Just a month after it was in House Beautiful, Esther's fireplace surround was purchased by Mrs. Woodring of Topeka, Kansas. Mrs. Woodring was the wife of Harry Hines Woodring, the twenty-fifth governor of Kansas. At this point the trail goes cold. It's unclear how long The Hunt remained in Topeka. All we know is that Esther’s work has made its way from California to Topeka to Dallas to New York. Who knows where it will go next?

Interestingly, Esther created a very similar terrazzo surround for the fireplace in her home in Ojai, California. As you can see from the photo below, it looks much like the piece that was on display in New York.

Photo from the Los Angeles Times, 7 June 1953, p. 28. 

If you are interested in purchasing Esther Bruton's The Hunt, you can find it here on Liz O'Brien's website.  Let’s hope that this wonderful, historic piece finds a good home!