Peacock in Garden

Jessie Arms Botke

Jessie Arms Botke's work had a decorative edge and often included lush vegetation and garden settings, such as this small but intricate gouache of a peacock, done around 1925.

Arms began her career in 1905 in Chicago when she was hired to design a frieze for Spierling and Linden Decorators. In 1909 she moved to New York and joined other artists at Herter Looms, a tapestry and manufacturing firm newly founded by the artist Albert Herter.

She stated: "Everybody was let loose to do the thing he loved best and my forte was birds. That's where I got the flair." Herter gave the artists the task of creating a peacock frieze for the dining room of the Billie Burke house at Hastings-on-Hudson. For this assignment, Arms studied peacocks at the Bronx zoo igniting her passion for birds and flora. While at Herter, she became a specialist in tapestry cartoons.

She left California, where she had completed a one year commission, for New York in the spring of 1915, stopping in Chicago to visit her parents. There she met, Cornelis Botke, a Dutch artist who was born in Haarlam, The Netherlands. They married on April 15, 1915, and the couple settled for a time in Chicago before moving west. They resided in briefly in Manitour, Colorado, San Francisco, Carmel, and Los Angeles. In 1929, they purchased ten acres of the Wheeler Canyon ranch in Santa Paula, California. They built a house and converted the barn into a studio and lived life as ranchers/artists.