Selden Connor Gile

Selden Connor Gile was born on March 20, 1877, in Stow, Maine. He completed high school in Fryeburg, Maine, in 1894, then moved to Portland to live with his older brother and attended Shaw's Business College, graduating in 1899. He had no formal art-school degree. Sources differ on his artistic training: some describe him as essentially self-taught, developing his approach to color after seeing early French Impressionist and Fauvist painting at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, while one gallery biography credits him with informal study under Bay Area artists Perham Nahl, Frank Van Sloun, Spencer Macky, and William H. Clapp, and at the California College of Arts and Crafts.

Gile settled in the East Bay and became the central figure among a loose circle of painters, working alongside artists including Maurice Logan, William Clapp, August Gay, Bernard von Eichman, and Louis Siegriest. Around 1923 this group began exhibiting together as the Society of Six, known for informal, vividly colored plein-air paintings of Oakland, Marin County, and the Bay Area, shown together through 1928. Gile exhibited regularly with the San Francisco Art Association from 1919 to 1935, and his work was included in the 1935 inaugural exhibition of the San Francisco Museum of Art. He held memberships in the American Artists Professional League, the Marin County Art Association, and the Oakland Art League.

Gile died on June 8, 1947, in San Rafael, California, after having entered the Marin County Hospital and Farm. Wikipedia and a dealer biography both attribute his death to cirrhosis of the liver, consistent with an account of declining health in his later years. He was buried near Mount Tamalpais, a site he had painted often.

Gile's standing rests heavily on his role as the organizing force of the Society of Six, a group now recognized in California art history for an unusually bold, color-forward response to Bay Area subjects at a time when most regional painting remained tonal and restrained. Later institutional attention, including a Smithsonian Institution exhibition in 1976 to 1977 and an Oakland Museum exhibition in 1981, helped cement this reassessment.

Gile's market is small and unevenly documented, typical of a historically significant but not widely traded early twentieth-century American painter. His current auction high is Quiet Cove (Belvedere), which sold for USD 312,575 including fees at Bonhams in Los Angeles in April 2019. Earlier and more recent sales establish a limited but active market: Tiburon Highway Along the Lagoon brought USD 137,000 at Bonhams, Cliffs of Marin totaled USD 156,250 with premium at American & European Art in November 2025, and a 2014 Heritage Auctions sale of Fall's Beginning reached USD 50,000. No single source in the available record offers a comprehensive, continuously updated auction history for the artist, so any given result should be read in the context of a limited, low-volume market rather than as part of a dense pricing curve.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Gile, and no single gallery or estate holds exclusive rights to his work; paintings move through a small network of dealers, including Calabi Gallery and Early Fine Art Dealers, alongside occasional appearances at regional and national auction houses. Signatures most often appear as S.C. Gile or simply Gile, and provenance and exhibition history carry significant weight in authentication given the absence of a raisonne. Because the auction record is thin, with relatively few high-value sales spread over more than a decade, collectors should treat any single price, including the current USD 312,575 high, as one data point in a market still being actively established rather than as a stable benchmark.