Amedee Joullin

Amedee Joullin was born in San Francisco, California, on June 3, 1862 (one gallery biography gives June 13, 1862), to French immigrant parents. He studied first at the San Francisco School of Design and privately under the painter Jules Tavernier, then traveled to Paris for further training at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with sources placing this period at roughly 1900 to 1905. Returning to San Francisco, he served as an instructor at the San Francisco School of Design from 1887 to 1897.

Joullin painted California landscapes, still lifes, and San Francisco Chinatown scenes, but he became best known for paintings of Native American life. Around the turn of the century he spent roughly nine months living among Pueblo communities in New Mexico, producing a substantial body of work on that subject, including The Passing of the Wampum Belt (1897) and Offering the Pipe to Thunder. He belonged to San Francisco's Bohemian Club, which held examples of his work, and a large painting of the driving of the last spike of the Northern Pacific Railroad hung in the Montana State Capitol in Helena. He died at his home at 1011 Florida Street in San Francisco on February 3, 1917.

Joullin drew sustained attention from California's art press during his lifetime. Arthur I. Street profiled him at length in Overland Monthly in January 1899 under a series titled California Artists. In 1900, both the San Francisco Call and The Argonaut ran items headlined around honors for Joullin, tied to The Passing of the Wampum Belt, though the exact nature of that recognition is not documented in accessible sources. His inclusion in major expositions, at Omaha in 1898, Charleston in 1902, and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, situates him among the recognized California painters of his generation.

Joullin's market is a small, historical one built on periodic secondary market sales rather than gallery representation. The only auction result with a fully confirmed price, house, and date is Still life with Pink Roses (1891), which sold for USD 7,500 at Heritage Auctions on May 3, 2017, per that house's own artist index. A separate online source reports a considerably higher price, over USD 106,000, for Offering the Pipe to Thunder, but that figure could not be corroborated by additional sources, and its auction house, location, and date are undocumented, so it is treated here as unverified. A Bonhams listing for The Passing of the Wampum Belt carried an estimate of USD 40,000 to 60,000, with no confirmed realized price available. Collectors should treat any single Joullin result as a data point in a thin market rather than as a stable trend line.

Joullin has no catalogue raisonne, and no gallery or estate currently represents him, so authentication runs through provenance research and the specialist knowledge of auction houses such as Bonhams and Heritage Auctions and dealers such as Christopher Queen Galleries. His known museum holdings, at the de Young Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Ball State University Museum of Art, support long-term institutional interest, but the auction record is thin: the only confirmed result is a USD 7,500 sale at Heritage Auctions in 2017, and a separately reported, much higher figure for Offering the Pipe to Thunder lacks the house, location, and date needed to confirm it. Collectors should expect limited liquidity and should verify any offered work's provenance closely given the age of the material and the absence of a governing authentication body.