Valentine Morse (1893 - 1940)

Valentine Morse was born in Oregon in 1893 and due to ill health was sent to New Mexico to recuperate. While there she became fascinated with the Southwestern desert landscape and its beauty. At that time she began a lifetime of learning how to paint landscapes, still lives and portraits of the land and people around her. She did not have an instructor or teacher and developed her own unique style, preferring to paint small format oil paintings on board so she could pay close detail to the flowering plants and adobe buildings of the desert. In the 1930’s she moved to San Diego, her studio was in Balboa Park’ s Spanish Village and area where many important early San Diego artist’s lived and worked. Due to an unfortunate accident she was run over by a car and died in 1940.