Ray Stanford Strong (1905–2006) was a notable California landscape artist with ties to West Marin, and to Inverness in particular. His 1934 oil painting, “Golden Gate Bridge,” created under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project and depicting the bridge under construction, was chosen by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to adorn the White House. Now it hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., where several of Strong’s Depression-era paintings are part of the permanent collection.
Born in Corvallis, Ore., Strong began painting at the age of 8. In 1924, he entered the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, later continuing his studies at the Art Students League in New York. After returning to San Francisco in 1934, he co-founded a local Art Students League along with painters Maynard Dixon, Frank Van Sloun and George Post.
During the Depression, Strong was employed as a W.P.A. artist, painting diorama backgrounds for public agencies and institutions. In 1935, he was assigned a studio in Berkeley and eventually moved to the East Bay with his wife, Betty. The couple lived in Berkeley for a decade beginning in 1938, mostly in a shingled Arts and Crafts backyard cottage they rented at 2632 College Avenue. Here they brought two children into the world. When their landlord announced a rent increase, the Strongs moved to Mill Valley, where they acquired land and built a house.
Strong was already painting in Marin County during the 1930s. In early 1937, he entered four paintings in the Bohemian Club’s annual exhibition. Three of the works were Marin subjects, including Inverness tidelands. Two years later, he entered a painting of an Inverness barn in an exhibition at the Golden Gate International Exposition.
Between 1938 and 1941, Strong teamed up with sculptor William Gordon Huff to produce educational dioramas for the exposition and the University of California extension. On the strength of those projects, the two won a proposal for a science wing at the newly opened Palo Alto Junior Museum. While they waited for the funding to materialize, they sought work to tide them over.
At about that time, Betty Strong’s father, the philosopher Harold Chapman Brown—known as “Father Brown” to his Inverness neighbors—retired from his professorship at Stanford University and acquired property in Inverness. In a 1998 interview, Strong told historian Dewey Livingston that the Olema Valley had been Brown’s favorite valley. Strong had suggested to his father-in-law that he build his cabin at 152 Perth Way out of extra-old redwood ties, for a Kentucky log-cabin look. Yet they hadn’t considered that “the graining on redwood ties might be slanted in and not out, and it began to leak,” necessitating the application of chinking. In Strong’s words, “we had to cover with slab cuttings on top of the redwood ties.”
In 1941, Strong and Bill Huff designed and built a one-room cabin for Dr. Joseph Moore and his wife, Maidee, while living for four months in an annex built by the Browns. Located at 154 Perth Way, just above the Browns’ cabin, the Moores’ simple redwood-plank structure lacked electric power. Strong’s friend, the actor George Bratt—also between jobs—was recruited to build cabinets and doors for the house. This project, too, wasn’t free of construction blunders. The Moores’ daughter, Judith, recalls that Strong and Huff installed the flooring before the framing was complete, and later had to pull it up.
Inverness was a welcome refuge for the Strongs during World War II. Ray was too old for combat service and felt guilty about not enlisting as a soldier.
In an essay, Dr. Michael Whitt, a friend of Strong, recalled how the artist painted many of the ranches on Point Reyes, and how Ansel Adams helped him deal with his guilty feelings around the war. Adams “assured Ray that his work on the home front was important, and the creation of beauty, of lasting importance to society,” Dr. Whitt wrote.
For four years, Strong worked at the Kaiser Shipyard No. 1 in Richmond, installing benches and tables in Liberty and Victory ships. More than three decades later, in an oral history for the Mill Valley Historical Society, the artist reminisced about his respites during wartime: “Almost every weekend, to get away from the welding and red lead and the utter chaotic confusion, we’d go to Marin,” he said.
Immediately after the war, Strong painted and worked odd jobs. For a time, he worked on a ranch in the Olema Valley, harvesting and putting up corn. When the Strongs moved to the Homestead Valley enclave near Mill Valley, they found a tight-knit community of like-minded folks. The move also afforded Strong ready access to his favorite painting grounds in West Marin.
Joseph and Maidee Moore’s full-time residence was near the Strongs’ house in Homestead Valley. Judith Moore, who still lives in the Perth cabin that Strong and Huff built for her parents, remembers taking art lessons from Strong in a small studio he built on his property. In the course of one memorable lesson, Strong asked his young students to climb into trees, observe them and sketch them from their vantage point.
The Strongs and Moores shared a common political outlook. “The whole lot of them were leftists,” Judith remembers. Dr. Whitt said Strong believed in cooperation rather than competition, and said his was a progressive kind of politics that by the late 1940s could be career-limiting, if not worse. Judith said her father maintained his own medical practice in Mill Valley, which gave him the independence to speak openly about his political beliefs.
But others were not so fortunate. Indeed, at the time of his death in 1943, Brown was the president of the American Russian Institute in San Francisco. Just three years later, the organization would find itself designated by the United States Attorney General as a communist front group.
Throughout his professional life, Strong’s favorite painting subject was West Marin, which he referred to as the “most beautiful and paintable country in the world.” Beginning in late 1990s, he teamed up with Dr. Whitt to put on an annual art show benefitting the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. Strong died in Three Rivers, in the Sierra foothills, in 2006. He was 101 years old.
Courtney Linn is the general counsel of a Sacramento-based credit union who lives in Inverness part time. Daniella Thompson is a Berkeley-based historian. They thank Judith Moore, Dr. Michael Whitt, Mike Durrie and Dewey Livingston for their assistance.