Lillian Grace Paca

Lillian Grace Paca lived a life that reads like three lives laid end to end. Born in Jamaica to a British army family, she trained as a portrait painter in Europe and kept a studio in Kensington; she served British Intelligence in the First World War; and in her later decades on the Monterey Peninsula she became a writer, poet and illustrator of the birds and marine animals of the Pacific coast, remembered at her death as one of the nation's foremost bird artists. The scaup ducks in our collection belong to that final, most celebrated chapter.

A Childhood in the West Indies

She was born Lillian Grace Barrington-Baker in Kingston, Jamaica, on 20 October 1883, the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Barrington-Baker and Susanna Mary Middleton. Her childhood was spent in the West Indies.

Training in Europe and a Studio in Kensington

She studied art in France and Germany and in London under the portrait painter Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope, and she became fluent in five languages along the way. She established her first studio in Kensington. In 1911 she was living with her parents at Hill House, Shotley, on the Suffolk coast, and between 1910 and 1915 she exhibited with the Ipswich Fine Art Club, showing portraits and a bookplate design. Her early professional life, in other words, was that of a trained academic portraitist, and the discipline of that training shows in the careful drawing of her later bird work.

War, Paris and a Marriage

During the First World War she carried out intelligence work for the British Intelligence Corps. After the Armistice she worked in Paris with the American Headquarters, and there she met an American serviceman, Edward Tilghman Paca (1877–1972); genealogical records give his birthplace as Carmichael, Maryland. They married in Philadelphia in 1920 and settled on a farm in Colorado, where they raised two sons.

Seals at Seal Rock and a New Vocation

During the Second World War she began sketching the seals and sea lions at Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach on the Monterey Peninsula. Those studies became her first book, Sea Lions and Seals of California, published by the W. T. Lee Company in 1947, and she remained on the Peninsula for the rest of her life. She wrote a nature column for the Monterey Herald, published Pelican Personalities, and became a member of the Carmel Art Association and of the Bowers Museum.

The Bird Books

In the late 1950s the Smithsonian Institution asked for her bird drawings, a mark of how seriously her work was taken by naturalists. Her books followed steadily: Introduction to Western Birds for Sunset Books and the Lane Publishing Company in 1953; Sea Gulls and Such: Shore Birds of the Pacific Coast for Pacific Books in 1961; The Royal Birds in 1963, a 164-page study of waterfowl illustrated with her own drawings; and California Sea Otters in 1967. She wrote the texts as well as drawing the plates, and her original pencil drawings, finished ink drawings, colour illustrations and lithographic plates for these books are now preserved as the Lillian Grace Paca Papers in the de Grummond Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi, spanning 1947 to 1972.

Poet of the Peninsula

Paca also published poetry, and the Monterey Peninsula came to call her its Poet Laureate. She died in Pacific Grove on 14 January 1978 at the age of ninety-four, more than half a century after the war that had first brought her to America.

Why Lillian Grace Paca Matters

Paca belongs to a distinguished line of artist-naturalists whose work sits between science and art: drawings made to be accurate enough for an ornithologist and handsome enough for a wall. What makes her unusual is the route she took to get there. She arrived at birds not as a hobbyist but as a fully trained European portraitist, and she brought a portraitist's attention to character and gesture to ducks, gulls and pelicans. For a collector, a signed wildlife work by Paca is a small, well-documented piece of California natural-history art, made by a woman whose papers sit in a university archive and whose drawings the Smithsonian sought out. Our scaup ducks, a subject squarely within the waterfowl she celebrated in The Royal Birds, are a direct connection to that body of work.