IN 1934, A down-on-his-luck artist named Selden Connor Gile was appointed part- time librarian for the city of Belvedere. Reportedly, his starting salary was $10 a week, then $15 a week. Truth be known,
Gile was hardly a go-getter except when it came
to painting. He was the un-appointed leader of
half a dozen Bay Area plein air painters known as
the “Society of Six.” And in 1937, he completed a
two-and-a-half-by-12-foot mural depicting nearby
Corinthian Island — a place that’s half in the town
of Tiburon and half in Belvedere — and hung it in
the town’s tiny library. The mural attracted atten-
tion. So much so that when the Belvedere library
merged with Tiburon’s library in 1953, a library
volunteer offered to hang it in her home for, as she
put it, “safekeeping.” And there it remained for
36 years — while interest in the colorful painting continued to grow. Finally in 1989, the son
of the volunteer sold it to an East Bay collector
for $65,000. Unfortunately, the collector’s home
was in the Oakland Hills, and the painting was
destroyed in the disastrous firestorm of 1991. But
fortunately, the collector had a color transparency,
done for an art book titled If Pictures Could Talk.
And in 1994 an article by Jeanne Price in The Ark
newspaper announced that the Belvedere-Tiburon
Landmarks Society had printed a limited edition
of 100 archival prints, of which a few remain for
sale for $200. If indeed pictures could talk, this
one might be saying, “On Corinthian Island, over
the past nearly 80 years, not much has changed.” M
Gi le’s
Mu ra l
This colorful painting
has an even more
colorful history.
BY JIM WOOD
Looking Back
DATED 1937
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Compare the mural to
the contemporary image
to see how times have
changed (or haven’t).
