Einar Petersen: The Forgotten Muralist of 1920s Los Angeles

Part of The Artist Archive, Viridian Eclection's research library of artist biographies and signatures. See also the artist page and the Signature Index.

In the autumn of 1915 the lobby of the new Rosslyn Hotel, at Fifth and Main in downtown Los Angeles, received a set of enormous painted panels, each roughly nineteen feet by nine, telling the story of the city from its Spanish beginnings to the year of the commission. The Los Angeles Times called them "handsome big panels," southwestern in theme and "even local in subject." Their author was a thirty year old Dane named Einar Cortsen Petersen, and the Rosslyn was the first of some twenty Los Angeles buildings whose walls he would paint.

Petersen lived to 101. He outlasted most of his murals, many of the buildings that held them, and very nearly his own reputation. Historian Mary Mallory has called him one of the greatest muralists in Los Angeles and California during the 1920s, and also one of its most thoroughly forgotten. This article gathers what can be verified about his life, his public work, his easel paintings and, in particular, how he signed them, because that last question is the one collectors most often need answered.

Copenhagen and the Grand Tour of a Decorator

Einar Cortsen Petersen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 17 October 1885. The Pacific Coast Architecture Database and Stern Fine Arts both give that date, and it is confirmed indirectly by Honolulu, which marked his hundredth birthday on 17 October 1985.

His training was practical before it was academic. He served an apprenticeship in Copenhagen around 1900, the route by which a young Dane entered the decorative painting trade. A Danish government scholarship then allowed him to study in Paris, Rome and Munich while he continued to earn a living as a decorator. The Pacific Coast Architecture Database adds that he may have attended the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf; that is offered there as a possibility, not a documented enrolment, and we repeat it on the same terms.

A few easel paintings survive from these European years and have appeared at auction: a village view signed and dated 1909, sold in Geneva in 2019, and two flower pieces dated 1908, sold at German auctions in 2010 and 2011. They show a painter already working on canvas, not only on walls, before he left Europe.

The Road West, 1912 to 1915

Petersen emigrated to the United States in 1912. Like many arrivals of the period he worked his way west, taking decorative commissions in Nebraska, Oregon and Washington. A 1976 Los Angeles Times profile, summarised by askART, credits him with about twenty murals in cities as far apart as Omaha, Spokane, San Francisco, Honolulu and Manila between 1912 and 1940. The Spokane connection is supported by an easel painting titled Hangman's Creek, signed and dated 1914, which has passed through auction more than once; Hangman Creek runs through the Spokane area.

Los Angeles: The Rosslyn and After

Sources disagree on the year he settled in Los Angeles. Stern Fine Arts and the Pacific Coast Architecture Database give 1916; askART gives 1915; Mary Mallory places his arrival in 1915, which is the year of the Rosslyn commission. The simplest reading is that the Rosslyn work brought him to the city in 1915 and he established himself there permanently by 1916.

The Rosslyn panels made his name. The Hotel Rosslyn, designed by John Parkinson and George Edwin Bergstrom, had opened about 1914. Accounts differ on the number of panels: Mallory and LA Observed describe six; the Pacific Coast Architecture Database and the 2013 eBay seller's account describe five. The Times praised the work as "excellent in its lines and masses."

Over the following fifteen years Petersen became one of the busiest decorative muralists in Southern California. The commissions that can be documented include:

• The Hunter-Dulin Building, 111 Sutter Street, San Francisco: pioneer murals for the lobby, 1926.
• The Mayflower Hotel, 535 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles (later the Hilton Checkers): Pilgrim scenes, 1927.
• The Spring Street Guaranty Building and Loan Association, 435 South Spring Street: ten murals and panels of Aladdin and His Lamp for the lobby and conference room, 1928, set in silver and black Art Deco surrounds under a lighting system that cycled colours across the paintings. One panel was titled The Bridal Procession.
• The Guaranty Building, Glendale: Spanish themed murals, 1930.
• Clifton's Brookdale Cafeteria, 648 South Broadway: a redwood forest mural.
• Schaber's Cafeteria, 620 South Broadway: a panorama blending fantasy and Spanish history across three walls, visible on a postcard postmarked 1941.
• The University Club and Roos Brothers in Los Angeles, the First National Bank in El Paso, Texas, and Honolulu Hale, the Honolulu city hall, where he painted the interior frescoes.

The Aladdin commission carries a footnote of its own. The association was founded by Gilbert Beesemyer, the developer associated with Hollywood and Vine; its new offices opened on 13 September 1928, and after Beesemyer's conviction for embezzlement the association closed in December 1930. Petersen's fairy tale about wealth gained by luck alone hung in the lobby of a firm that proved the point.

Hollywoodland, the Studio Court and Honolulu

In 1927 Petersen hired architect Harry Muck to design a Spanish Renaissance house for him at 2706 Beachwood Drive in Hollywoodland. He was also associated with a group of artists' studios at 4350 to 4352½ Beverly Boulevard. On 13 November 1991 the City of Los Angeles adopted that property as Historic-Cultural Monument No. 552, under the name Einar C. Petersen Studio Court. askART, drawing on the 1976 Times profile, says he lived in the same courtyard of cottages for some fifty years.

He was a member of the California Art Club and of the Painters and Sculptors of Los Angeles. In late 1929 sketches he had made on several of the Hawaiian islands were exhibited at the Architects Building in Los Angeles, and the architect William Lee Woollett published an appreciation of them in Architect and Engineer in January 1930 (volume C, number 1, pages 85 to 87). Stern Fine Arts also records his participation in the Scandinavian American Art Society exhibition in Los Angeles in 1939.

Hawaii remained part of his working life. A large oil titled Homage to the Queen is signed, titled and dated "Honolulu 1939" on the reverse, and Honolulu honoured him with an Einar Petersen Day on his hundredth birthday.

The Long Second Half

The great age of the decorated commercial lobby ended with the Depression, and so did the bulk of Petersen's mural work. He kept painting. Dated easel pictures document him at San Pedro and Los Angeles harbour (Dry Dock, 1939; Fishing Boats, Los Angeles Harbor, 1940), in the desert (Cotton Wood Trees in the Desert, Snow Creek Canyon) and on the Central Coast (Harvest Time, San Luis Obispo, 1948). askART records him as active in Morro Bay before 1934. A canvas offered at Westport Auction in May 2026 is described as dated 55 or 53, which, if read correctly, carries the documented work into the 1950s.

On 12 October 1976 the Los Angeles Times ran Marilyn Fuss's profile, "Now 91, An Artist Recalls when Walls were his Canvases," which followed him around downtown looking for murals that had vanished behind renovations and new names. He died in Los Angeles on 6 December 1986, aged 101.

Reading the Signature

This is the section that matters most to anyone holding a painting with Petersen's name on it, and it is where we have been most careful.

Documented forms

Only a handful of catalogue entries transcribe the signature letter for letter. Those that do show the first name or its initial in every case:

1. "Einar C. Petersen." Dry Dock, oil on canvas, 20 by 24 inches, dated 1939, is described as signed lower left "Einar C. Petersen," signed again, titled and dated on the reverse (LiveAuctioneers record; the same description appears for the lot offered at John Moran Auctioneers in May 2022).
2. "Einar." An oil offered by Westport Auction in May 2026 is described as signed "Einar" and dated 55 or 53, lower right.
3. "Einar Petersen." Our own October 2026 research sweep recorded the full first and last name as the most common form in auction records. Most catalogue entries, however, simply say "signed" without transcribing the words.

We have not found a single catalogued, documented Einar Petersen easel painting signed with the surname alone.

Placement

Front signatures appear at either lower corner, with no strong preference. Lower left: Dry Dock (1939), Cotton Wood Trees in the Desert, Snow Creek Canyon, California Landscape, Dry Dock, San Pedro Harbor, Monterrey Harbor, and the portrait Black Ivory, where the dealer notes the signature is in yellow. Lower right: Fishing Boats, Los Angeles Harbor (1940), Harvest Time, San Luis Obispo (1948), Coastal Landscape, Hangman's Creek (signed and dated 1914), and the Westport canvas. A gouache mural study of about 1929 sold at Abell Auction in 2021 is signed lower right.

The reverse

The most distinctive habit in the record is what Petersen wrote on the back. Again and again catalogues report the canvas signed a second time on the reverse, together with a title and often a date: Dry Dock, Fishing Boats, Los Angeles Harbor, Harvest Time, San Luis Obispo, Cotton Wood Trees in the Desert, Monterrey Harbor, Hangman's Creek and Black Ivory all carry inscriptions on the verso. Homage to the Queen is signed, titled and dated "Honolulu 1939" on the reverse only. His titles tend to be place specific: a canyon, a harbour, a county.

Murals

Murals were often not signed at all. The seller of the surviving Rosslyn stagecoach panel reported in 2013 that it was the only one of the panels to bear the artist's signature, and that even so he had at first been unable to identify the painter from it.

Why PETERSEN-only works are catalogued as attributed

Petersen is a common Scandinavian surname, and a number of unrelated painters signed with it. A canvas signed PETERSEN in capitals, with no first name and no inscription on the back, departs from both of the habits that recur across Einar Petersen's documented work: the first name on the front and the title on the reverse. The surname alone cannot distinguish him from any other Petersen.

That is the position of our three paintings. Each is signed PETERSEN in capitals on the front. They share a hand, a palette and a Western subject range consistent with his late landscapes, and one, the Black Rock Ranch landscape, carries its title on the reverse, which echoes his documented practice. Those points are why we connect the paintings to him. The capital surname signature is why we describe them as attributed rather than as documented works. An earlier version of our artist page described PETERSEN in capitals as his usual signature; the evidence does not support that, and we have corrected it here.

Anyone weighing a Petersen attribution should look for, in order: a first name or initial in the signature; a second signature, title or date on the reverse; a place specific title; and comparison with an authenticated example of the same decade.

Style and Subjects

Petersen's murals were decorative in the full sense: designed to sit within architecture, to be read from across a lobby, and to carry a single narrative clearly. His subjects followed the commission. Pioneer history for a San Francisco office tower, Pilgrims for a hotel named Mayflower, Aladdin for a savings and loan, Spanish California for Glendale, an enchanted redwood forest for Clifton's. The surviving gouache studies, such as Nymph and Fawn in Paradise and Pan in Paradise, show a stylised Art Deco idiom with flattened space and ornamental animals.

The easel paintings are quieter. The documented titles are mostly landscapes and working harbours: dry docks, fishing boats, cottonwoods, harvest fields. Dealers have also handled portraits such as Black Ivory, and figurative Hawaiian subjects such as Homage to the Queen. An oil sold in 2021 was catalogued as a Tonalist Arts and Crafts view of Pasadena. A monumental painting on board dated 1924, about 90 by 174 inches, showing a wagon train meeting Native people, sits between the two practices: a picture at mural scale, painted on a movable support.

Where His Work Is Today

Most of the public work is gone. What can be said with confidence:

• Rosslyn Hotel. The panels were removed during 1980s renovations. Four were bought by a California couple; three later went to auction in poor condition, and the fourth, the signed stagecoach scene, was offered on eBay in June 2013 at $5,000. Its present location is not recorded.
• Clifton's Brookdale. The Los Angeles Conservancy lists his redwood forest mural among the original features preserved in the restoration completed for the 2015 reopening. This is the most accessible surviving Petersen mural.
• Spring Street Guaranty Building. By April 2012 the lobby walls were blank beige; the Aladdin murals had been removed or painted over.
• Schaber's Cafeteria. When the space became a Carl's Jr., the three wall panorama was reportedly stretched and framed as two separate paintings. Their whereabouts are not published.
• Honolulu Hale. The building is in use as Honolulu's city hall; the frescoes are credited to him there.
• Mayflower, Hunter-Dulin, Glendale, El Paso and others. We have found no published confirmation either way. Mallory reports that by the 1970s to 1990s most of his murals had been destroyed or hidden behind false walls.

The Einar C. Petersen Studio Court on Beverly Boulevard survives as a city landmark. We found no record of his work in a public museum collection.

The Market

Petersen's auction record is thin. askART counts about twenty lots with a sell through rate of about 65 percent; artnet lists eleven results between 1992 and 2022. The houses that have handled him include Bonhams, John Moran Auctioneers, Clars, Barridoff, Abell, Crescent City Auction Gallery, Geneve Enchères and Westport Auction. Realised prices are mostly behind subscription walls, so we do not quote them. One dealer states that his paintings have sold at auction for about $10,000; we have not been able to verify that figure. The asking price for the Rosslyn stagecoach panel in 2013 was $5,000, for a mural in poor condition.

Two practical points follow. Fully documented works, with a first name signature and a titled reverse, are scarce. Works signed with the surname alone sit in a separate and more cautious tier, priced and described as attributions.

Myths and Corrections

• Birth year 1895. Some dealer listings give 1895. The documented year is 1885, consistent with his centenary in 1985 and his death at 101.
• Born in Los Angeles. One dealer listing says he was born in Los Angeles. He was born in Copenhagen.
• Los Angeles murals of 1912. One article states that the earliest Los Angeles murals were painted by Petersen in 1912. He reached the United States in 1912 and the West Coast later; his first documented Los Angeles mural is the Rosslyn of 1915.
• Five or six Rosslyn panels. Both numbers appear in reputable sources. We report both.
• 1915 or 1916. Both years are given for his settling in Los Angeles. See above.
• "Peterson." The name is spelled Peterson in some secondary accounts, including the Wikipedia entry for Honolulu Hale. He spelled it Petersen.
• Signed PETERSEN. The documented signatures include his first name or initial. A surname only signature is not his recorded practice.

Our Paintings

The Eclection holds three mid century oil landscapes signed PETERSEN, each catalogued as attributed to Einar Petersen for the reasons set out above: a winter mountain landscape, the Black Rock Ranch landscape with its title on the reverse, and a desert village scene. We describe them as circa 1950 to 1970. They are in our Einar Petersen collection. If you own a documented Petersen with a titled reverse and are willing to share photographs of the signature, we would value the comparison.

Timeline

Sources

• Mary Mallory, "Hollywood Heights: Einar Petersen, Forgotten Artist," Los Angeles Daily Mirror
• Mary Mallory, "Einar Petersen and His Aladdin and His Lamp Murals," Los Angeles Daily Mirror, 2013
• "Einar Petersen Mural From the Rosslyn Hotel, Found on eBay," Los Angeles Daily Mirror, 2013
• "Schaber's Cafeteria and Einar Petersen," Los Angeles Daily Mirror, 2012
• "Lost Einar Petersen mural from Rosslyn Hotel on eBay," LA Observed, 2013
• "Monthly Mural Wrap," PBS SoCal, June 2013
• Pacific Coast Architecture Database: Einar Petersen
• Pacific Coast Architecture Database: Hotel Rosslyn
• Pacific Coast Architecture Database: Woollett, "Einar Petersen's Sketches," Architect and Engineer, January 1930
• Stern Fine Arts: Einar C. Petersen (1885 to 1986)
• askART: Einar Cortsen Petersen
• Invaluable: Einar Cortsen Petersen auction results
• artnet: Einar Cortsen Petersen
• LiveAuctioneers: Einar C. Petersen, Dry Dock (1939)
• 1stDibs: Homage to the Queen, 1939
• 1stDibs: Monterrey Harbor, circa 1930s
• 1stDibs: Monumental Western painting, 1924
• 1stDibs: Nymph and Fawn in Paradise, mural study
• JB Fine Art: Black Ivory
• Los Angeles Conservancy: Clifton's Brookdale Cafeteria
• Wikipedia: Honolulu Hale
• Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments listing (No. 552)
• Marilyn Fuss, "Now 91, An Artist Recalls when Walls were his Canvases," Los Angeles Times, 12 October 1976 (as cited by askART)

Share What You Know

Einar Petersen's record is still being assembled, one canvas back and one lobby photograph at a time. If you own a signed Petersen, remember one of his murals, or hold family papers that touch his life, we would be glad to hear from you. Write to us here, and we will add verified information to this page with credit.