Ambrose Patterson

Australian native Ambrose Patterson studied art in Paris and assembled an impressive exhibition history at the Paris Salon d’Automne, the Royal Academy in London, and the Guggenheim in New York among others. He relocated to Hawaii in 1916, then San Francisco arriving in the Northwest in 1918. He founded the School of Painting and Design at the University of Washington (now the School of Art), and was one of the first modernist artists to bring a range of avant-garde artistic ideas to the region. Seattle Art Museum held three solo exhibitions of his work in the 1930s to 1950s as well as a retrospective in 1961.