Carl Eytel

Carl Eytel (September 12, 1862 – September 17, 1925) was a German American performer who built his reputation for paintings and drawings of desert subjects in the American Southwest. Immigrating to the United States in 1885, he fixed in Palm Springs, California in 1903. With an extensive knowledge of the Sonoran Desert, Eytel traveled in the flavor of author George Wharton James as he wrote the successful Wonders of the Colorado Desert, and contributed greater than 300 drawings to the 1908 work. While he enjoyed triumph as an artist, he lived as an teetotal and would die in poverty. Eytel's most important work, Desert Near Palm Springs, hangs in the History Room of the California State Library.