Palms Depot

Artist Charles Payzant (1898 - 1980)

Date1940s

MediumWatercolor on paper

Dimensions12 1/2 x 19 in. (31.8 x 48.3 cm)

ClassificationsPainting

Credit LineGift of The Hilbert Collection

Object number2020.129

DescriptionCharles St. George Payzant was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and lived there until World War I, when he served with the 23rd Nova Scotia Highlanders and the Royal Flying Corps. In the 1920s, he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Otis Art Institute and later at Chouinard Art Institute, among peers who would also become influential painters in the Californian Regionalist or California Scene movement.

During the Great Depression, many California Scene painters took up work the movie studios in Hollywood to earn a livelihood when their private commissions failed to suffice. Payzant began working for Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s doing watercolor backgrounds and landscape scenes. His art appears in many of the well-known Disney movies of the time, including Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).

The Palms Depot was built in 1886-88 by the Southern Pacific Railroad, originally located at the corner of National and Vinton in an area of L.A. that eventually took its name from the depot: The Palms. From the 1920s through the ‘40s, the area of The Palms and Culver City became home to a number of important Hollywood movie studios, and famous celebrities were often spotted boarding or disembarking from the Red Cars that stopped at this station. The Red Car line was shut down in 1953 and the station was abandoned. Although it was declared an L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument in 1963, the building continued to deteriorate until a fundraising campaign saved it and moved it to the Heritage Square Museum in Montecito Heights. Today the refurbished station serves as the museum’s gift shop.

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