LOS ANGELES — In 1893, an itinerant plein-air English painter came to the West Coast to die. At 51, William Lees Judson could look back on a life full of adventure: trans-Atlantic crossings, farming Ontario’s plains, fighting under Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War, Beaux-Arts immersion at Paris’s Académie Julian. When his wife died suddenly and his own health soured, doctors advised him to take the “California cure” and spend his last days in the Golden State’s hot, dry air.
“Instead, he lived another 35 years, started U.S.C.’s College of Fine Arts in this building, and helped launch the Arts and Crafts movement,” his great-great-grandchild David Judson said recently at the stained glass studio the elder Judson founded in 1897.