The following is a transcription of a handwritten account by Francis Zimbeaux, circa 1986. Punctuation has been added or edited for clarity. Zimbeaux, or “Zim” as he was known, was a Salt Lake City artist active from the late ’40s until his death in 2006. His father, Frank Zirnbauer (later Zimbeaux), grew up and began his career in the Pittsburgh area. A portrait painter, he moved to Paris at the turn of the 20th century and began painting in a painterly, expressionist style. At the outbreak of World War I, he moved his family first to Carthage, Missouri, and later to Salt Lake City, to be near Henri Moser, a Utah artist he had met while in Paris. Many of the individual elements described in this history, as well as the general evocation of a lost arcadia, can be found in many of Zimbeaux’s works.

In this drawing for one of his annual Christmas cards, Zimbeaux depicted a young, teenage Jesus with a pet donkey. Ink on paper, 4 1/4 x 7 in.

At some time in the early years of my life, my father and mother artist father and my mother left their studio in Paris, France because of the war, where they had lived for many years on the Left Bank among all the artists of those days and where I was born on Bastille Day, the independence day of France. My mother and I went to England where her two maiden sisters lived and operated a little delicatessen store. My father came on to the U.S. to visit his sister, who he hadn’t seen since a small boy. It was a year or more before my mother and I came to the U.S. also, after he had opened a little studio in the small town of Carthage, MO, where his sister lived. That is how I came to know the Ozarks as a small boy.

Those were happy days as a boy before the age of 14, in the countryside at a place called Thomas Hill, near the town of Carthage where we rented a little shingled house that blended so well with the surroundings. Across a little dirt road to the west was a small forest of large oak trees (probably virgin), to the east beyond our little vegetable garden and a grove of blackberries was a rather park-like area of more large oak trees where it seems Indians and Gypsies used to camp in the early days. This kind of open forest land continued for about 3/4 of a mile on a gradual slope until it came to a small creek that used to dry up in mid summer. In those large oak trees were where the crows used to roost and caw was always fascinating to me. To the south, the land gradually sloped with farmers’ fields and corn patches. At the lower end in a pasture were a group of persimmon trees where the cows used to get in the shade seek shade in the hot weather. There was a little pathway by a fence where you could walk along a cornfield until you came to Spring River where there was an old flour mill that was still operating then with its dam that was still operating then. This was a nice excursion on a Sunday afternoon for my father and mother and me with a picnic basket. There were sand bars and rippling water over pebble water shallows and big trees along the banks of this nice small river. We kids used to turn over rocks along in the shallow water and catch “crawdads” which we used for fishing bait. This nice slow and flowing river with the dam and a couple of row boats was rather a delightful place which my father enjoyed, yet so far different from life in Paris. Yet it was kind of a country ideal for a small boy, a happy life in arcadia, the wild woods and fields to roam in, the streams to fish in, with rabbits and squirrels and skunks and all kinds of birds and the crows cawing in the woods in the early morning, and the wonderful summer evening when everything was so till and sometimes just a bit humid, with and the glow of fire fliers flies all about. What more could a boy ask for.

Ink and watercolor on paper, 14 x 19 in.

When I was about 10 or 12 my father bought me a little donkey not realizing the problems it would cause. It was trained to ride but also had a mind of its own, and when it didn’t want me to ride it, it would scrape me off under low branches. It got itself into all kinds of trouble. My father had a few beehives near the garden and one time the little donkey pulled its tether loose and dragged it and twisted it all around the beehives and then and they stung him all about the nose and eyes and he got out of the yard and ran for several miles with the bees following him. Some of the beehives had curiously been turned over in the commotion. It really upset my father. Another time there were there was a farmer that lived a little way down the road. He used to take vegetables and fruit to a market in Carthage. Once, coming home towards evening with his horse and wagon, my donkey was standing right by the gate alongside the road and just as the farmer’s wagon passed the donkey decided to bray. Now I’m sure that horse had heard donkeys bray before as there were other donkeys in the neighborhood, but for some reason it got the horse upset and the old farmer couldn’t control it. It The horse broke and ran, not down the road but off through the trees until the wagon got stalled in the brush and had spilled some of vegetables he hadn’t sold. After this incident my father decided to give the donkey away.

Ink on paper, 8 1/2 x 11 in.

Though Francis Zimbeaux was in his thirties before he started painting, memories of his childhood in the Ozarks quickly surfaced in his work. The description of his childhood in this biographical sketch, including the single oak tree and grove of trees near his home, as well as the roosting crows who made their home there, became the subject of many works. Many of these included frolicking, child-like figures.

These sketches and paintings were part of the artist’s estate at has passing and since have become part of Artists of Utah’s collection. The works are available for purchase.

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UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.