Bertha Stringer Lee Museum Collections

Bertha Stringer Lee, Golden Gate Park, Oil, 8″ x 4.75″

Born in San Francisco in 1869 to a storage company tycoon, Bertha Stringer was encouraged to go into the arts from an early age. She displayed work for the first time at the age of 14, and went on to study at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute and UC-Berkeley. In 1894 she was married to Eugene Lee, an electrician, and took a studio in their home on Steiner Street, where she often entertained.

Lee’s work was primarily landscape and tonal scenes, generally of the San Francisco Bay or the Monterey Peninsula. Not in need of money, most of her pieces were given as gifts to friends and family members. A great number of her works were lost in the fires that directly followed the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. She exhibited at the Alaska-Yukon Exposition, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Sequoia club, the Golden Gate Park Museum and the Richelieu Gallery and has works in the permanent collection of the St. Mary’s College, the Oakland Museum and the De Young Museum.