Euphemia (E.) Charlton Fortune, who went by Effie in her personal life, was born in Sausalito. She studied at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, continued her training at the Art Students League in New York, and spent many of her active years painting in and around Monterey, California, where she maintained a home.

As a painter, Fortune has frequently been labeled an Impressionist, though her work moved beyond the style into Post-Impressionism and even modernism. Her signature works were strong in color—frequently in primary or complementary hues—and rugged and gestural in execution, the paint applied with a “flying brush.” Many reviewers and critics called her paintings “masculine,” and those who did not know her often assumed she was a man both because of the power of her paintings and for the way she signed them—E. Charlton Fortune—which she used because she disliked the name Euphemia and because it leveled the playing field with male colleagues. In 1924, when she won a silver medal at the Paris Salon, the award went to “Monsieur” Charlton Fortune.

In the 1920s, she lived and painted for extended periods in St. Ives, England, and Saint-Tropez, France. Upon her return to California in the late 1920s, she began designing ecclesiastical work and founded the Monterey Guild, directing members to create art and furnishings for Catholic churches. Working first in Monterey and then Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and Kansas City, Missouri, she ultimately helped transform more than seventy church interiors in sixteen states.