Professor William H. Gerdts of City University of New York, in his 1990 three volume set Art Across America, we share with you here:
"Canadian-born Theodore Gegoux spent most of his mature years in Watertown, New York, where, after taking some training in France, he turned from mercantile to artistic pursuits, painting portraits of eminent figures including Governor Roswell Flower and members of the state's supreme court. In 1909 failing health took him to Portland, where he painted landscapes and flower pieces and began a retrospective series of portraits of the city's first 24 mayors. Gegoux's masterpiece was his eleven-foot-long "Birth of Civil Government in Portland (Champoeg Memorial State Park, Saint Paul, Oregon), created between 1915 and 1920, which reconstructed the moment on May 2, 1843, when Oregon was declared a part of the United States by a local vote of fifty-two to fifty. This had occurred at Champoeg, south of Portland in the Willamette Valley, where the aged Gegoux became caretaker of the Champoeg Memorial House. In 1924 he took his painting on an exhibition tour through the state, leaving two years later to join his family in California." (20)
(20) "Artist's Painting Unveiled," Oregon State Parks Quarterly, Spring 1979, (pp.1-2).
Art Across America, Two Centuries of Regional Painting (1720-1920), Volume Three
Abbeville Press, New York
By William H. Gerdts, 1990
Professor Emeritus of Art History
Graduate School of the City University of New York
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