Lucy R. Peckinpaugh Smallman (1840–1920): Pioneering Artist, Collector & Benefactor

Lucy Smallman gravestone

Plot 11, Lot # 125

Lucy Smallman lived a life that reads like a catalog of reinvention—artist, educator, collector, and, by the end, a quiet benefactor whose work helped shape how early Californians saw their own landscape.

She was born Lucy Adeline Briggs in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, in 1840, a descendant—according to contemporary accounts—of the Pilgrim captain Myles Standish. Like many New Englanders of her generation, she came west in the decades after the Gold Rush, arriving in California in the early 1860s, where she would remain for the rest of her life.

Her name changed often, reflecting marriages and personal upheaval—Cole, Rawson, Peckinpaugh, and finally Smallman—but her identity as an artist endured. Early tragedy marked her life; she lost both her husband and infant child within days of each other in San Francisco in the 1870s. Yet she persisted, turning increasingly toward art and teaching.

Smallman became associated with Mills College in its early years, serving as head of the art department when the institution was still located in Benicia. She later spent two decades living in the mountains of Madera County and in Napa Valley, landscapes that would inform her work and sensibility as a painter.

Her artistic reputation rested largely on botanical studies and California landscapes, rendered with a precision that blurred the line between art and science. Late in life, she assembled and donated a remarkable collection to what was then the Oakland Public Museum: fifty paintings of California wildflowers, carefully organized by floral family and labeled with both common and scientific names. The exhibit was noted for its accuracy of detail and color—suggesting not just artistic talent, but a naturalist’s discipline.

That gift, like much of Smallman’s life, was both personal and public—an attempt to preserve the natural beauty of California in a form that could educate as well as inspire. It was also part of a broader contribution: she donated relics of the colonial era and Native American works to the museum, helping to build an early civic collection that reflected California’s layered past.

She died at her home on Cuthbert Street in Oakland’s Fruitvale district, remembered in the newspapers as a “pioneer artist.” The phrase is apt, though perhaps incomplete. Smallman was not simply among the first artists in California—she was among those who helped define what California art could be: rooted in place, attentive to nature, and conscious of history.

Her paintings, like the flowers they depict, were meant to endure—pressed, cataloged, and remembered long after the landscape itself had begun to change.

Sources: Oakland Tribune obituary (Feb. 23, 1920); Oakland Tribune exhibit notice (June 25, 1947); AskArt/biographical records on Lucy Adeline Briggs Cole Rawson Peckinpaugh Smallman; Find a Grave