Selden Connor Gile · 1877–1947

Selden Connor Gile: a biography

Self-taught and a full-time painter only late in life, Selden Connor Gile was the founder and the driving force of the Society of Six, the Oakland group whose saturated color changed Bay Area painting.

Maine

Selden Connor Gile was born on March 20, 1877, in Stow, Maine, the youngest of six children of James Henry Gile, a farmer, and Ellen Alice Bemis. He was named for the governor of Maine at the time, Seldon Connor. After high school in Fryeburg he graduated from Shaw's Business College in 1899, and then worked a series of jobs. Through a family connection he was offered work as a paymaster and clerk at a ranch in Rocklin, California, and he arrived on the West Coast around 1901 to 1903. His earliest known painting, a small New England landscape called Farm Scene, is dated 1900.

Oakland and the Society of Six

Gile stayed employed outside of art until he was fifty, painting on weekends. He was self-taught, and the change in his work came in 1915, when the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco showed him the French Impressionists and the Fauves. His palette shifted from muted tones to the high-keyed color that defines his best work.

He became the center of a group of Oakland painters who met on weekends at his cabin on Chabot Road, known as the Chow House: August Gay, Maurice Logan, Louis Siegriest, Bernard von Eichman and William Clapp. From their first exhibition together at the Oakland Art Gallery on March 11, 1923, to their sixth and last as a group in 1928, they were generally well received. They painted outdoors and usually finished a picture in a single sitting, and Gile's small boards of those years are thickly and loosely brushed.

Tiburon

In the spring of 1927 Gile left his job as an office manager at Gladding, McBean and Company and moved to a cottage he had kept since the early 1920s on the bay at Tiburon, in Marin County, to paint full time. That September he had his first solo exhibition, at the Northbrae Community Center in Berkeley, and 1928 brought shows at the Galerie Beaux Arts in San Francisco and the Oakland Art Gallery. His last major solo exhibition in his lifetime was at the Paul Elder Gallery in May 1930.

After the move he saw his fellow painters less often, and the Depression, together with his drinking, pulled the group apart. In the 1930s he painted fewer oils and more watercolors, and he began to include working people in his pictures. He painted Belvedere's only WPA mural, for the public library, where he also worked part time as a librarian, and later a mural for a railroad office in San Francisco.

Last years

He exhibited in group shows every year through 1937. Toward the end of his life he could no longer pay his rent, and a few months before he died he checked himself into the Marin County Hospital and Farm. He died there of cirrhosis of the liver on June 8, 1947.

Legacy and collections

Gile's high-keyed color and his willingness to let the paint stay loose made him a forerunner of the Bay Area figurative painters of the 1950s. The principal study of the group is Nancy Boas's The Society of Six: California Colorists (1988). His paintings are held by the Oakland Museum of California and are recorded by the Smithsonian Institution.

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Sources

Original text prepared for this site. Facts were cross-checked across the sources below. Sources differ on whether he arrived in California in 1901 or 1903, so this page gives both.

1. Wikipedia, "Selden Connor Gile." en.wikipedia.org (accessed October 2026).
2. Nancy Boas, The Society of Six: California Colorists, Bedford Arts, San Francisco, 1988.