Photographs and textual materials generated by artist and writer John Clifford Cowles, documenting his time in Montana and his career in southern California.

John Clifford Cowles was born in 1861 in Freeport, Illinois and studied in New York City with Albert Bierstadt and others. He made a career as a painter and photographer in the American west during the 1880s and 1890s, before going to Paris to study with Albert Besnard and Jean-Charles Cazin. In his writing, some of which is collected here, Cowles asserts that Senator William Andrews Clark was his patron in the 1890s and that he aided in the growth of Clark's art collection, but the extent to which this may be true is unclear. Cowles returned to the US in the late 1890s and lived primarily in Los Angeles until his death in 1951. In 1932, he wrote The whispering buddha, a mystical mystery novel.

1.2 Linear Feet 1 box and 1 bound volume

Copyright has not been assigned to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Clark Librarian. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.

Collection is open for research.