About Gordon Coutts
by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
That beautiful portrait that greets you on the welcoming-page of the Emma-Lindsay Squier Website is by Scottish artist Gordon Coutts (1868-1937) of the Royal Academy of London. He is well known to this day for his portraiture & impressionist landscape paintings of the various places he lived -- Australia, California, Morocco. His daughter Jeanne Granada Coutts became a successful artist after him; her own international reputation won her a commission to do a famous life-size portrait of the Emperor & Empress of Ethiopia. Here are three lovely items he painted that can be viewed elsewhere on the web:
The painting at left -- shown courtesy of Savill Galleries of Sydney & Melbourne -- is called "Sydney Harbor from McMahon's Point, 1898." It reflects Gordon's love of Australia, where he met his wife.Elsewhere on the web you can view some of his California paintings, such as this one of Cattle pastured on a Marin County Landscape,California having been for more than a decade his best-loved home.
And you can also share his window on a place loved in his youth, via his painting called From My Studio, Tangier
His studio in Tangier is a particularly noteworthy painting since it was to so greatly impact his life in California, when Emma-Lindsay met him. "Dar Marroc" ("Morrocco Villa") was the name Gordon gave to the home he built in Palm Springs in 1924, his nearest neighbor being the movie star J. Carol Nash. Dar Marroc became a cultural center for California artists, musicians, dancers & the literati, boasting such guests as Winston Churchill who is said to have personally taken up brush to work on paintings of his own in Gordon's Dar Marroc studio, & Rudolph Valentino. He selected the motif for the villa out of his desire to recapture his youthful life in Tangiers. Though I have not yet found a more complete overview of the specific artists who flocked to his villa, it is evident that Emma-Lindsay was among them. And by the cheerful appearance of the young woman in this amazing portrait, it is equally evident that days spent at Dar Marroc were joyful for Emma-Lindsay.
In time, after Gordon had passed from this world into, we may hope, another, the mansion fell into extreme disrepair. It required four years of restoration before it was transformed into the "Korakia" (Greek for "Crows"), the idyllic but ghastly expensive inn shown in the photograph at the top of this page. The interior is today all tattied up with the present owners' international collection of geegaws & yardsale "finds." If you can afford it, I doubt you'd be disappointed to stay there, & if you want to pay for a second room for me to come along, do get in touch; I'm perfectly willing to settle for one of the little garden rooms. Here's a Korakia Web Page with a couple more pictures that'll give you an idea of the degree of Gordon's success!
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