Emil Janel was a master wood carver by any standard. He created life-like grizzled old men engaged in conversation, boxers engaged in the fight of their lifetime, beautiful Art Deco women, and even self contained figures carefully carved within a larger piece of wood serving as a framework for the figures inside.

And his artistic endeavors were not limited to his carving activities. Janel was a painter with a very modernist palette, using bright, even luminous, colors to create landscape and still life paintings.

Emil Janel was born in Orsa, Sweden in 1897. He began whittling at age six, and by 1921 was exhibiting his work in Stockholm. In the late 1920s he immigrated to San Francisco, where he studie...