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California’s most pre-eminent sculptor of the late 19^th century was both a disabled Berkeley man and one of the first artists from the then-young state to earn international attention and acclaim. 

Three quarters of a century have now passed since his death and he has fallen into some obscurity even here in his adopted hometown.  

But he’s an important figure in our local history, whose presence both early and late in life helped establish Berkeley’s enduring reputation as a community of the arts and a hospitable place for the disabled to live and work. 

One hundred and fifty years ago this year, Douglas Tilden was born. Half that time--seventy-five years ago, August 6, 1935—he was found dead, apparently from a heart attack, in his home on Channing Way at Sixth Street. He lived alone in the modest house with backyard studio, and it was unclear how long he had been deceased when a friend found his body.  

Although Tilden was not born in Berkeley, we can claim him as a honorary native son, by virtue of his long association with the California School for the Deaf as a child and young adult and his choice of Berkeley as a place to live and work during the last several years of his life. 

Tilden was born May 1, 1860, in Chico and lost his hearing due to scarlet fever when still a young child. In 1866 he became one of the early students sent to the young Institution for the Instruction and Maintenance of the Indigent Deaf and Dumb, established in San Francisco in the year of his birth.  

Despite the forbidding Dickensian name (or Harry Potteresque, for you young readers), the Institution was a progressive facility that became, in the 20^th century, the renowned California State Schools for the Deaf and Blind.  

The institution provided its live-in students with both academic and vocational instruction and independent living skills long before the modern disabled rights movement was born in Berkeley. 

The Institution broke ground for a new campus in Berkeley in 1867 and fully relocated here from San Francisco in 1869. It remained until relocation to Fremont in the early 1980s; the old Berkeley site is presently the University of California’s Clark Kerr Campus.  

Thus, Tilden spent many of his formative years in Berkeley. He joined the School as a teacher after graduation and experimented with sculpture and considered going to UC, which would have made him one of the first deaf students to matriculate there.  

But he so impressed the Board of Directors with a statuette that they gave him money to pursue artistic training in New York and Paris (Tilden contended the money was a scholarship; the School claimed it was a loan, and kept the “Bear Hunt” statue, described later, as reimbursement).  

In Paris he came into his own as a sculptor, creating works that won him awards and admiration. One of these, dated 1893, was “The Football Players”—two young male figures, based on French models, wearing what we might today describe as rugby or track and field uniforms.  

The statue was purchased by San Francisco Mayor James Phelan who was a year younger than Tilden, and had studied at Cal. Phelan offered it in 1898 as a prize to the first team, Cal or Stanford, to subsequently win two Big Games in football. 

Cal, which had an undistinguished record to date against Stanford, rallied in response to the incentive and with the help of professional coach and former Princeton star Garrett Cochran soundly beat Stanford in 1898 and 1899.  

Cochran still remains the Cal coach with the best win/loss percentage, and “The Football Players” came to the UC Berkeley campus where it was dedicated, May 12, 1900.  

It was sited along the path between what was then the football field to the north, and the gymnasium to the southeast, and was the first piece of permanent outdoor art installed on the campus. 

At the time Tilden was riding high. His sculptures had been in major exhibitions, he was teaching at the UC-affiliated Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco, and was a newly minted member of the Bohemian Club. He had married in 1896 and greeted his first child, Gladys, in 1900 just a few months before “The Football Players” was dedicated on campus. 

In subsequent years Tilden would complete several public commissions, including his statues of the “California Volunteers” and “Admission Day” monument in San Francisco, and “Twelve Stages of Man” for Lakeside Park in Oakland.  

He also helped found the California Association for the Deaf (CAD), wrote a novel, established a studio in Oakland and, in part because of his artistic reputation, was able to become a public advocate for the disabled. 

In 1903 he wrote, “The deaf live in a world of their own; a world of pantomime, a world of eternal silence; an auxiliary sphere almost totally unknown to the majority of hearing people. To every 2,000 citizens there is perhaps but one deaf mute. This one man is known to—say 100 people, the remaining 1,900 know little or nothing about him, the little they do know is boiled down to one opinion. “He, the mute, must necessarily be an ignorant being, because he can neither hear nor speak.” Some of the 1,900 would be astonished to know that in reality the gray matter of the mute is of just as fine a fiber as is that of a hearing man.”  

As the 20^th century wore on, however, Tilden’s star went into decline. His style of sculpture was superseded by new trends, he did not get major new commissions, and he had to work as a machinist. He fought with some CAD colleagues and lost his wife to divorce in 1924.  

Now in his mid-60s, impoverished, and perhaps somewhat embittered he moved back to Berkeley that same year and built a small studio. While he continued to design and create he was estranged from key friends, family, and benefactors, and sank into poverty.  

Tilden would certainly not be the last live / work West Berkeley artist to experience suffering, financial hardship, and disappointment while trying to carry on a creative avocation. 

In November, 1930 the Oakland Tribune reported “Art, ever a faithless mistress, has refused to serve Tilden, and today…his studio (is) crammed with the fine creations of his own hands but empty of food or money. Tilden is compelled to ask that a state old age pension be granted to him.” 

“The world, engrossed in its own struggles, surged forward and forgot the man whose sculptures will live long after he has passed.” 

Several prominent Tilden works do indeed live on in the Bay Area, eighty years later. They include a version of his “Tired Boxer” in the De Young Museum and what’s now known as the Mechanics Monument on Market Street in San Francisco. 

That commission, for Peter Donahue, depicts several men operating a large punch press and, although shorn of its encircling pool, is an iconic Downtown San Francisco memorial. 

Berkeley once had two big Tilden statues. One was “The Bear Hunt”, a physically dramatic scene of two Indians locked in desperate combat with a mother grizzly, while her cubs shelter at their feet. 

“The Bear Hunt” went to the Deaf School campus on Warring Street where it ultimately had a place of honor in a courtyard adjacent to the administration building and in front of a boy’s dormitory.  

Tilden feuded with the School, arguing that the sculpture belonged to him, but it was retained by the School after his death and, in 1980, moved to Fremont where in stands in an open plaza on the current campus. 

“The Football Players”, still standing on its original site more than 110 years after dedication, is thus the only publicly visible artwork by Tilden in Berkeley, although a set of his papers and family memorabilia is housed in the Bancroft Library. He is otherwise not remembered (Tilden Park is named for another individual).