In July 1937, Paul Julian was in the process of painting his first ever mural commission. Originally located above three archways inside the Santa Barbara General Hospital (later repurposed, becoming the Santa Barbara County Psychiatric Health Facility) the mural, titled ‘Picnic on a Cliff’, is now lost. As far as I can find, its existence is documented in three places. The first is the Fullerton Heritage website’s archived page on the history of the post office which houses the ‘Orange Pickers’ mural. Here, an anonymous author provides the most in-depth Paul Julian profile available anywhere on the internet, albeit without listing any sources. Since beginning my research, the Fullerton Heritage website has been updated, and so this specific account of Julian’s life can now only be accessed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine. The second reference to ‘Picnic on a Cliff’ is in the September 1995 edition of Noticias, the Santa Barbara Historical Society’s quarterly magazine which was founded in 1955 and continues to this day, with issues as recent as June 2021. The article featuring a short overview of Julian’s life and work seems to be where Fullerton Heritage sourced a significant part of its information, without credit to the original publication. The author of the Noticias article, Patricia Gardner Cleek, in turn credits a personal letter exchange with Paul Julian as her source. The final reference to ‘Picnic on a Cliff’ is via San Diego State University Library’s Digital Collection, where an archived photograph of the mural stands as testimony to its existence. Categorised under the tags
Murals
Lost works of art
Trees
Cliffs
Oceans
the description of it reads:
Black and white image of a color mural. A group of people gather for a picnic on a cliff above the ocean. Originally located at the Santa Barbara General Hospital. Current location unknown.
Paul Julian died aged 81 on September 5th, 1995; the issue of Noticias featuring his profile was published just a few weeks later. In one of his letters to Gardner Cleek regarding the hospital mural, Julian wrote:
“The cliff was real… my brother and I had wandered all over the Mesa in the late Twenties, before there were houses on it.”
