By Betty Bullimore and Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society
While doing research on renowned Western painter and sometime Sausalitan Maynard Dixon, I came across a charming profile of avant-garde painter Enid Foster’s early days here. Foster was a childhood contemporary of Dixon. Here are excerpts from a 1953 Sausalito News profile by Betty Bullimore:
IMAGE FROM SAUSALITO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Self-portrait, c. 1960s.
Four years before the death of David O'Connell, the Irish Poet, who lived and died in Sausalito, a future Bohemian moved into the town. A colorful personality whose fringe of white hair peeping out from under a head scarf and faded blue jeans have become as well known in Sausalito as her drawings and her anecdotes of the past.
Enid Foster, who lives in a picturesque two room cottage on Fourth street, with her two dogs, a duck called Emily and a sparrow she found as an abandoned fledgling, remembers back to the days of Judge Bellrude. The Judge was also the local cab driver who met the ferry boat at the public dock and took passengers home at night in his brightly polished “surrey with the fringe on top" drawn by a pair of high stepping brown horses. The judge was often called from his cab to perform a marriage ceremony or sign important papers and was never known to neglect any of his varied duties.
Enid, who was the younger of two sisters, was born at her grandmother’s home in San Francisco, in 1895, but Sausalito had been her parents’ home for some time. Seven years before she was born, Enid’s father had a bachelor apartment at the foot of Princess Street, now occupied by business buildings. Charles Jay Foster enlarged his place when he married and the Fosters lived there for many years. The house was burned down some years later.
As a small girl, Enid spent most of her time drawing and painting, and her parents, realizing that there was a great deal of talent in her small hands, built her a studio. She was only 21 when she was asked to model the memorial to Sarah B. Cooper, the founder of kindergartens in San Francisco. The memorial is in the Golden Gate Park. Before she was five, her drawings had attracted the attention of Julien Rix, the Sausalito painter. As a joke he pinned them to the wall of his studio and told skeptical friends that they were his own drawings. Said Enid, “They thought he had gone raving mad.” She recalled the days of the old ferryboats and told me about the little harpist who entertained the passengers and of his wife who collected pennies in an abalone shell.
INDIAN PONY
Shortly after Enid was presented with a small Indian pony, she met Maynard Dixon, who later became famous for his paintings of Arizona. “Horrible small boy he was then, a few years older than I. He once threw a cantaloupe at me and my pony became frightened and galloped off. I nearly died of fright,” she said.
Then there was the time when Enid became an active citizen. She spotted a fire and called out the manual fire engine. When the panting firemen arrived at the scene, the “fire” turned out to be a steaming manure heap. Five year old Enid was very upset.
She told me the story of her early attempt to study anatomy. “My parents were very good and were fortunately progressive intelligent people; they also believed in letting me study art in the ways I chose and I managed to persuade them to buy me a corpse. “I had decided to study at Stanford hospital and duly reported there for my first lesson. The doctor and instructors were very amused and didn’t think for one moment I’d stick it out — how right they were. “I shall never forget it. They told me to pick my corpse; I shuddered and asked them to fish any one out of the solution and cover it up. I went into the corridor while they heaved out the body.
“I began with the hand, that seemed impersonal enough. I think I managed to stick that lesson out, but when I fled from the building that after noon, I never returned.” she laughed. “I never did see what my corpse looked like”.
She spent a year with architect Charles Peter Weeks, who designed the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. Enid executed sculpture work for him. There have been exhibitions of Enid's painted drawings in the De Young Museum, the Legion of Honor and the San Francisco Museum of Art, as well as many in Sausalito. The most recent was at the Alta Mira Hotel. Enid is a delightful mixture of the old and the new. She is one of the few bohemians who belong to Sausalito by birth as well as by choice, and is one of the best known figures in the town.
Enid Foster has recently been the subject of an Historical Society exhibition at City Hall, and of a sumptuously-illustrated book by the Society’s Allan and Carol Hayes which is available online or at Sausalito Books by the Bay.