Author: Mary Millman, Dave Bohn

Publisher/Date: Capra Press, 1994, first edition

Format: Brown cloth bound hardcover book with dust jacket, 192 pages,

Description: Winkler was an extraordinary artist and no less an extraordinary human being. The authors – one of whom knew the subject for the last seventeen years of his life – have experienced a nine-year odyssey in putting together the pieces of this American etcher’s distinguished career.

From the dustjacket: John William Winkler was born in Vienna in 1894 and, with the aid of his mother and grandmother, left for the United States in 1910 on a forged passport, never thereafter to reveal his birthnames. Once in the New World he was determined to meet Buffalo Bill and see the Indians. Reaching San Francisco by 1912, he stumbled upon the entryway of the San Francisco Institute of Art and enrolled on impulse to learn “cartooning”and thereby make a million dollars. But about three
weeks into the course he discovered fine art and never looked back. By 1918 he had become a master pure line etcher and by 1920 had earned the title “artist laureate of San Francisco.” Bertha Jaques in Chicago would later compare him to Rembrandt, and John Taylor Arms referred to him in 1934 as “master of line” and in 1940 as “master of us all.”
Winkler’s great reputation as an etcher, however, served to obscure
his later work, notably the pencil and pen-and-ink drawings, the conte crayon and carbon pencil drawings of high Sierra trees, and the carved rootwood boxes, more than two hundred of them, which took twenty years to produce.
Winkler was an extraordinary artist and no less an extraordinary human being. The authors-one of whom knew the subject for the last seventeen years of his life -have experienced a nine-year odyssey in putting together the pieces of this American etcher’s distinguished career. Winkler never managed to meet Buffalo Bill but he certainly did meet his destiny.