Granville Redmond · 1871–1935

Granville Redmond: a biography

Deaf from early childhood, Granville Redmond became one of California's most admired landscape painters, celebrated both for his fields of poppies and lupine and for his hushed tonalist nocturnes, and was a friend and occasional actor for Charlie Chaplin.

Philadelphia to Berkeley

Granville Richard Seymour Redmond was born on March 9, 1871, in Philadelphia, to a hearing family. He lost his hearing very young (accounts differ on whether scarlet fever was the cause), and the family moved west to San Jose, California. From 1879 to 1890 he attended the California School for the Deaf in Berkeley, where his teacher Theophilus d'Estrella taught him drawing, painting and pantomime.

San Francisco and Paris

He went on to the California School of Design in San Francisco, studying for three years with Arthur Mathews and Amédée Joullin, and won the school's W. E. Brown Medal. There he met Gottardo Piazzoni, who learned sign language and became a lifelong friend. In 1893 a scholarship from the California School for the Deaf took Redmond to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin-Constant and shared lodgings with the deaf sculptor Douglas Tilden. In 1895 his painting Matin d'Hiver was accepted at the Paris Salon.

Southern California

Redmond returned to California in 1898 and settled in Los Angeles. In 1899 he married Carrie Ann Jean, a former student of the Illinois School for the Deaf; they had three children. He painted along the coast at San Pedro, Laguna Beach and Catalina Island, and in the hills and fields around Los Angeles. By the mid-1900s he was recognized as a leading landscape painter and a bold colorist, winning a medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904 and a silver medal at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909. At times he also lived and painted with Piazzoni in Northern California, at Parkfield and at Tiburon.

Poppies and nocturnes

Redmond's best-known pictures are views of California hillsides covered in orange poppies and blue lupine, painted in a high-keyed Impressionist manner. He is often said to have preferred his quieter work: moonlit coasts, marshes and twilight landscapes in a muted, tonalist palette. Both sides of his work are represented in the gallery's past sales.

Charlie Chaplin

In Los Angeles, Redmond became a close friend of Charlie Chaplin, who admired his expressive use of sign language and pantomime. Chaplin gave him a studio on his movie lot, collected his paintings, and cast him in several films, including the sculptor in City Lights (1931).

Legacy and collections

Redmond died in Los Angeles on May 24, 1935. His paintings are held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the de Young Museum, the Huntington Library, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford and the California School for the Deaf, among others. The New York Times later remembered him in its "Overlooked No More" series.

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Sources

Original text prepared for this site. Facts were cross-checked across the sources below. Sources disagree on the cause and timing of his deafness, so this page does not state one.

1. Wikipedia, "Granville Redmond." en.wikipedia.org (accessed October 2026).
2. The New York Times, "Overlooked No More: Granville Redmond, Painter, Actor, Friend."