Bonnie Portnoy never knew her grandfather.

After more than two decades of research that began with a single trip to the Marin County Free Library, the San Rafael resident has pieced together the extraordinary life of Tilden Daken, a California Impressionist painter who rode freight trains with Jack London and once painted scenes beneath the Pacific Ocean.

Portnoy will present her findings in a free public lecture on Saturday, August 1, at the Sonoma Community Center in Sonoma. The talk is part of the Sonoma Valley Historical Society's Conversations with Historians series.

A life made for headlines

Daken, born Samuel Tilden Daken in Bunker Hill, Illinois, in 1876, was principally self-taught. He began painting frescoes, murals, and stage curtains before joining the California Impressionism movement, painting outdoors across California's state parks and throughout the national parks of the West.

He met Jack London atop a haystack at the Reno train station in 1901. The two worked briefly in a Truckee lumber yard, then rode the brake beams of a freight train to Oakland. They renewed their friendship in 1906 when Daken and his first wife, Mary, moved to Glen Ellen, where he painted hundreds of scenes of Sonoma Mountain and the surrounding countryside at London's Beauty Ranch.

Art critic Harry Noyes Pratt captured Daken's range in the Berkeley Daily Gazette in October 1927: "Whether he was braving the Mexican war between Villa and Carranza, where he was wounded three times and once held prisoner of war for eight weeks, or dancing around like a crazy man to keep from freezing to death while painting the Piute Pass in midwinter; facing unknown terrors of the ocean depths to secure true submarine views ... always he thought of his art and sought to put true pictures of the world around him on canvas."

That Mexican adventure was no exaggeration. In 1914, Daken was shot three times in Mazatlán and held as a prisoner of war for two months during fighting between Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa. He had gone to Mexico to paint and scout material for San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where his works were later exhibited.

Daken also used a custom-built diving bell to paint underwater scenes, according to the Marin Independent Journal. He traveled on painting expeditions to Hawaii, the South Seas, Alaska, and Hollywood, where he revealed an unusual sensory synesthesia by painting to music in the "key of red."

A granddaughter's detective story

Portnoy, a former retail executive and Marin County native, started her research in January 1999 at the Marin County Free Library at the Civic Center. She lives just a few miles north of the Arts and Crafts house Daken built in Mill Valley in the 1920s, a connection she didn't discover until she launched the Tilden Daken Legacy Project.

According to art historian Edan Milton Hughes, Daken produced more than 4,000 works during his career. He died in 1935. His tombstone in the Georgetown Pioneer Cemetery is a bronze artist palette.

Portnoy's book, "The Man Beneath the Paint: California Impressionist Tilden Daken," includes some 240 illustrations of his artwork and early 20th-century photographs. Published by Jack Bacon & Company, the hardcover is available at Copperfield's Books in San Rafael, Book Passage in Corte Madera, and Sausalito Books By the Bay.

Upcoming

Saturday, August 1 — Bonnie Portnoy lecture on Tilden Daken, 10:30 a.m., Sonoma Community Center, room 110, 276 E. Napa St., Sonoma. Free. Part of the Sonoma Valley Historical Society's Conversations with Historians series.