Nestled
at the back of a spacious garden in the kitchen of an old cottage, Robert
Arbegast is seen at his laptop computer. It was on this computer that Arbegast
originally built this website, www.mulleian.com, and uploaded it onto the
newly burgeoning Internet in the early morning hours of a day in mid-1999.
This humble cottage setting was once the maid’s quarters for a family
residing in the adjoining mansion, built at the turn of the century prior
to the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The small estate was one of
the earliest, if not the first, built in the sand dunes that surrounded Sutro
Gardens. In time, this garden setting, perched upon the rocky cliff, sentinel
to the vast Pacific vista and passageway to universal time, would serve as
the inspirational atmosphere in which many of Mulleian’s works were conceived.
And it was in the wooden cottage where many of his renowned works were produced,
paintings such as The Orphan and Dies Irae, and drawings such as Death of
Hephaestion and Alantean Pharaoh. Other works were to follow.
