Japanese Tea Garden

1879-1916 An illustrator and painter, Cyrus Cuneo was born in San Francisco, California in 1879. He studied locally at the Mark Hopkins Institute and in Paris with James Whistler and Girardot. A fine athlete, he and his brother Rinaldo were prominent as boxers at the Olympic Club. As a young man he was offered Charles Dana Gibson’s position on Collier’s Weekly. An expatriate Italian American, Cyrus Cuneo spent much of his career in England, from where he served as an artist-illustrator of the American West for the London Illustrated News. It was written that he became “an Englishman by preference and adoption.” In London, he was a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and from 1905 to 1912, exhibited at the Royal Academy. He paid for his art training in Paris with James Whistler by boxing professionally. In 1908 on assignment with the Illustrated News, he made an extensive trip back to California and through Canada, where he was a special guest of personnel representing the Canadian Pacific Railroad. From this trip, he did a series of railroad oil paintings, which were destroyed during World War I in Liverpool. During his employment at the Illustrated News, Cuneo was commissioned by the British government to paint a panorama of King Edward’s coronation pageant. While at a farewell party in London, a society girl’s fingernail scratched him and he died of blood poisoning on July 23, 1916. Memberships: Royal Institute of Oil Painters. Exhibitions: Royal Academy of Arts; Panama Pacific International Exhibition, 1915.