Eustace Paul Ziegler and Sydney Laurence Paintings

Eustace Paul Ziegler 

Eustace Paul Ziegler 

Eustace Paul Ziegler 

Attributed to Sydney Laurence

Ted Lambert Paintings

Ted Lambert (1905-1960) is regarded as one of the premier Alaska artists, a true pioneer. Born in 1905, and raised in the Chicago area, Lambert moved to Alaska in 1925 and went to work as a miner near McCarthy. He held several jobs, predominantly working at a copper mine and mushing dogs -- first for adventure, and then as a mail carrier.

Lambert left Alaska in 1931 to study art for a year at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, then moved to Seattle, where he began a mentorship under Eustace Ziegler, with whom he traveled throughout Alaska and painted. Eventually Lambert settled down in Fairbanks, where he stayed for twenty years and solidified his reputation as a painter and an artist.

Tragically, in 1960 he disappeared from the remote cabin he was living in at Bristol Bay. No trace of his body was ever found, but among the effects rescued from his last home was a memoir of his early days in Alaska. These memoirs reveal Lambert to be a keen and intelligent observer and relay the adventure story of a young man who would become one of Alaska’s most important artists.

Ted Lambert

Ted Lambert

Ted Lambert

Ted Lambert

Ted Lambert

Ted Lambert

Edmond J. Fitzgerald : Family Friend

Edmond James Fitzgerald (1912-1989)

A marine, landscape and portrait painter as well as combat artist during World War II, Edmond J. Fitzgerald was born in Seattle in 1912, one of seven children. He graduated from the California School of Fine Arts where he was a student of Lee Randolph. At age nineteen, Fitzgerald was part of the U.S. Geological Survey Expedition to Alaska, and was so taken with the geography, he returned annually for the next ten years, sometimes in the company of Eustace Ziegler "who influenced him more than any other artist." Ziegler and Fitzgerald had nearby studios on Pier 9 in Seattle on the waterfront. 

Another good friend and painting companion was Eric Johanson, with whom he painted near Index, Washington on the Skyhomish River. Fitzgerald also had a studio near Haystack Rock on the Oregon coast.

Fitzgerald served 26 years in the United States Naval Reserve. During World War II, he commanded an LST (landing craft) and had numerous subsequent combat and other naval activity art assignments.

In 1940, just prior to his naval service, he married Mary Louise Streets, one of his art students who became a ceramics artist and also worked with him on murals. The couple had two children, whom Fitzgerald sometimes used as models for figure and portrait painting. In 1940, they moved to New York City, and after the War, settled in Larchmont, New York where he had a studio from where he also taught art classes. 

Also, he used the Greenwich Village studio of his good friend Chauncey Ryder when Ryder was on vacation, and Ryder sponsored Fitzgerald's membership in the Salmagundi Club. Fitzgerald sometimes returned to the Pacific Northwest beginning 1946, when he did numerous landscapes of favorite places for a one-man exhibition at the Grand Central Galleries in New York.

Teaching assignments included Newark Academy of Art, Parson's School of Design, and the New York Academy of Design. Fitzgerald was a past president of the Allied Artists of America and the American Watercolor Society, for whom he became the first Honorary President and also a regular exhibition juror. Memberships included The Artist's Fellowship and the National Society of Mural Painters.

In 1977, his first wife died. The following year Fitzgerald married Margaret Trent, and they moved to her home town of Cincinnati. He died there from cancer in 1989.

He was the author of Painting and Drawing in Charcoal and Oil and Marine Painting in Watercolor.

Don Mangus: Artist Connections