Temple Courtyard

Elizabeth Eaton Burton

Best known for her Arts and Crafts metal work in copper, brass and bronze, Santa Barbara, California artist Elizabeth Eaton Burton briefly tried her hand, quite successfully, at Japanese style color woodcut, such as this composition of a Japanese Temple. She would have been familiar with the medium since British woodcut artist Frank Morley Fletcher was teaching color woodcut in Santa Barbara after 1923.

Burton's father designed and built an estate in Montecito California called 'Riso Rivo' which featured a lotus pond and a floating Japanese Tea House. In 1930, following her father's death, Burton spent two more years in France, after which she went to China and Japan to paint watercolors and study woodblock printing.

A number of her watercolors were published as woodblock prints by the Tokyo publisher Kato Junji and formed the core of a traveling exhibition that traveled the globe in 1935–36, making stops in Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and New York.