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Jimmy Swinnerton’s life was even zanier than the comic strips he created (including Sam and his Laugh, Professor Nix, Little Katy and her Uncle, Mount Ararat, Mr. Batch, Mr. Jack, Little Jimmy, Canyon Kiddies, The Daydreams of Danny Dawes, and Rocky Mason, Government Marshall.)  

Born in 1875, Swinnerton ran away from home at age 14 to join a traveling minstrel show.  He used blackface makeup as a disguise to elude his parents and the sheriff. 

Swinnerton led an adventurous life during the waning days of the wild west.  He rambled from job to job (and from bar fight to bar fight).  He drank heavily, gambled constantly, spent recklessly, and lied shamelessly.  These attributes made him irresistible to women.  

Depending on how we count, Swinnerton had somewhere between four and six wives. His biographer claimed that Swinnerton also “had a lady friend hiding behind every sagebrush on the desert,” but let’s confine ourselves to his wives.  Here’s the scorecard:

• Swinnerton’s first wife was Thalia Treadwell, a glamorous San Francisco heiress. They married under mysterious circumstances; when friends asked for details, Swinnerton would only say, “the marriage took place between [San Francisco
  and New York] but I can’t tell you the place nor date for legal reasons.”  The couple quarreled bitterly, and Thalia abandoned her new husband and went to Japan. 

• Swinnerton next married Harriet Hacker after a whirlwind courtship. Harriet was beautiful but she “enjoyed the night scene“ a little too much, going out to the clubs and sometimes not returning for days. When Swinnerton
  contracted tuberculosis he asked Harriet to move to the desert for his health, but she refused, citing the shortage of nightclubs in the desert.

• Although still legally married to
  Harriet, Swinnerton moved to the desert alone.  There he quickly found a new girlfriend, Espie Castle.   The 1910 US
  census reports that Jimmy married Espie (which would’ve made him a bigamist) but in response to questions, he was evasive about their status. When Espie had a religious
  conversion and asked Swinnerton to join her in pious living, he quickly left. 

• In 1917 Swinnerton belatedly divorced Harriet and two days later married his third – or fourth – wife, Louise Scher, a statuesque blonde divorcee.  The two quarreled constantly over Louise’s spending habits on lace nightgowns.  Swinnerton borrowed thousands of dollars from her mother to pay for Louise’s extravagances, then left without repaying her.

• By 1933, Swinnerton was living in Las Vegas.  He divorced Louise and quickly married his fourth – – or fifth – – wife, Gretchen
  Richardson.  On her way to the wedding, Gretchen stopped
  off at a Vegas casino to play roulette. She placed a
  silver dollar on number 12 and when the number hit, she decided it was an omen and stayed to gamble rather than go to her wedding. She eventually showed up several hours late. 

Swinnerton was quick to marry and just as quick to leave.  He seemed to lack the patience or interest to explore what lay beneath the surface of his wives.  Yet, his attitude toward art was the exact opposite.

Swinnerton had infinite patience for painting the same desert landscapes over and over for decades.  He would loyally return every year to the same sites to paint the same scenes.  One of his exasperated wives complained, “why I do this each year I have never been able to figure out, because it’s the same trip, same road, auto camps, same climate, and has been for the last several years.”  

Even Swinnerton’s grandfather urged him to stop wasting his time on the same flat, drab “hellholes” such as Death Valley and the Mojave Desert and paint more glamorous landscapes.  Swinnerton responded that beauty lay beneath the surface, and that patience and faithfulness would be rewarded:  “Just you put full confidence in the [beauties of the desert] and she’ll show you all her secrets.”  He would spend all day in the hot sun, carefully waiting for the desert to reveal her charms.

Clearly Swinnerton didn’t require the same variety in his landscapes that he required from his wives.  He found a sustaining variety in the rocks and sand (“Every minute in the desert is all new and completely different.”)

It’s also noteworthy that Swinnerton lied incessantly to his wives, yet as a painter he was obsessed with accuracy.  His mission was to make a true, literal representation of reality.

For some reason, Swinnerton’s values in art didn’t seem to carry over to his love life.  If painting gave him any insights into patience and the nature of beauty, those insights didn’t seem to apply to his wives.  It’s true that every artist must make tradeoffs, but looking at the meager quality of Swinnerton’s paintings, one has to wonder whether he struck the best trades.