Elizabeth Charleston

Elizabeth Charleston was a San Francisco native who painted impressionist flower and landscape paintings. Charleston began painting at the age of 50, while recovering from an automobile accident.

Elizabeth Charleston was born in San Francisco, California in 1910, shortly after the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906. She attended the Katherine Delmar Burke School and lived the vivaciousness of a wealthy San Franciscan of the time. During her youth, she lived in France, and those memories complex were reflected in her works. Her intimates was to the side of connected like the San Francisco Bay Area arts community.

At the age of 50, Charleston was in an automobile crash which limited her endeavors and mobility. She began painting for the first era while recovering.

The San Francisco Chronicle's late art critic Alfred Frankenstein reviewed her showing at the Pomeroy Gallery in 1968, and said Charleston had a "wonderful eye" for flowers -- "totally charming, decorative and delectable." Most of her works were impressionist oil paintings of flowers and the French countryside. Her works are comprehensible widely today, and have been shown in numerous museums and galleries in the US, Brussels, and Paris, including Hammer Galleries in NY (at least four one-woman exhibitions at Armand Hammer's famed galleries), Frank H. Boos Gallery in Bloomfield MI, Conacher Galleries in San Francisco, Salon des Femmes Peintres in Paris in 1974, the Salon exhibition at Société des Artistes Français in 1973, the US Embassy in Brussels, and at the Nationale des Beaux Arts Exposition du Tricentenaire in 1973.

Charleston is listed in Clara, the National Museum of Women in the Arts' database of women in the Arts. Charleston is popular in the ventilate of San Francisco Bay Area collectors, including Laura King Pfaff (chairman of Bonhams & Butterfields, the world's third largest auction house).

Charleston died on April 8, 1997 in San Rafael, California, near San Francisco.