George L. Hutcheson was a craftsman and self-taught painter and wood carver whose remarkable artistic life only began after decades of working as a ranch hand and carpenter
 

Born in Scotland in 1902, George travelled to California in 1919, directly after graduating school. Family records tell of an adventurous early life that included working as a ranch hand around Santa Barbara, and a period associated with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. He eventually settled in Glendale, California, establishing a home at 266 Elk Ave, and continuing to work for many years as a carpenter.

In the 1936 Isadora Verdugo, for whom he’d worked for years, came to live with him. Dora was ‘the first lady of Glendale’; a descendant of The Verdugos, one of the area's earliest Californian families who, from 1784 until 1904, held over 36,000 acres of land which included Glendale, Pasadena and Burbank.
 

One day, 71 yr old George, bored with retirement, picked up a length of wood and began to cut away at it. Deciding to teach himself from library books, he began carving figures and animals in earnest, as well producing a numerous oil paintings
 

Among his most ambitious project were two sets of extraordinary hand-carved busts of the Presidents of the United States, beginning with George Washington and continuing through Richard Nixon, the nation's 37th president. One set was sold during George's lifetime. The second remained with Dora and, following her death in 1984, was bequeathed to our family, together with a number of George's paintings.

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This collection is therefore more than a group of individual artworks. It is the surviving work of an adventurous man who spent most of his working life as a carpenter until, late in life turned his hand, and heart, to creating art.

With our matriarch coming to the end of her years, we are now offering these works to new owners, in the hope that Uncle George's story, and Dora's, and the one of a kind pieces he created, will continue to be treasured.

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