Granville S. Redmond

Granville Richard Seymour Redmond was born on March 9, 1871, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He lost his hearing in early childhood after contracting scarlet fever and was raised largely in California, where he attended the California Institution for the Education of the Deaf, Dumb, and the Blind in Berkeley. His talent for drawing was recognized there, and he went on to study at the California School of Design in San Francisco beginning in 1890, followed by further study at the Academie Julian in Paris from 1893. No formal degree is documented for either period of study.

Redmond built his career as a landscape painter working first in a somber, atmospheric Tonalist mode and later in a brighter Impressionist palette, becoming especially known for fields of California poppies and lupine along the coast and in the Los Angeles basin. He exhibited widely in California through groups including the San Francisco Art Association, the Bohemian Club, the California Art Club, and the Laguna Beach Art Association, and won medals at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis and the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. His painting Evening reportedly received a gold medal at the San Francisco Art Association's 1904 Spring Exhibition, as reported at the time by the Los Angeles Times.

Redmond was fluent in sign language and, through that skill, became friends with Charlie Chaplin, who admired his paintings, occasionally purchased them, and cast him in small character roles in several silent films. Redmond died on May 24, 1935, in Los Angeles, California; his exact cause of death is not consistently documented in the sources reviewed for this profile. He was reportedly buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, according to public genealogical records.

Redmond is consistently described by dealers and museums as one of the leading painters of early California, prized for his handling of light in both his darker Tonalist nocturnes and his sunlit poppy fields. The 2019 to 2020 traveling survey Granville Redmond: The Eloquent Palette, organized by curator Scott A. Shields for the Laguna Art Museum and the Crocker Art Museum, brought together roughly 85 paintings and was described by the organizing institutions as the largest survey of his work ever assembled, renewing critical and market interest in both his Tonalist and Impressionist periods. Charlie Chaplin, a friend and admirer of Redmond's work who occasionally purchased his paintings, was known to speak warmly of the joyousness and color in his landscapes.

Redmond's auction market is led by California Poppy Field, reported to have sold for USD 542,500 at Bonhams in Los Angeles in August 2014, among the highest publicly documented prices for his work. The exact sale date and a fully verified ranking of his top auction results are difficult to confirm independently, since comprehensive price databases for the artist are largely subscription gated. A separate poppy and lupine landscape, Poppies and Lupine, brought USD 212,575 at Bonhams Los Angeles on August 4, 2020, and led that particular sale. Beyond these standout results, his market runs largely in the low five to low six figures across regional and specialist California and Western art sales.

Redmond's market is thin relative to his institutional standing, so prices for individual works can vary widely depending on subject matter, with poppy field and coastal compositions generally commanding the strongest results. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance, exhibition history, and comparison to the documented record works are the main tools for evaluating a given painting. His deep representation in major California museum collections, together with the recent traveling retrospective, is the strongest signal of his durability as a historical figure, even as the number of high-value public sales remains small and difficult to verify in full.