Splendide Californie!: Selections by French Artists in California History, 1786-1900.

Nineteenth-century California was not a destination for the faint of heart, given the uncertainties of sea travel and the difficulties of a land crossing through the enormous American wilderness. Yet many visitors from France made their way to the remote territory, starting in 1786, and left enduring accounts of its beauty and growth. Although many of these French documents still await translation, they form a vital part of California's early literary history, enriching our knowledge and understanding of that distant time.

Many of these French visitors wielded the brush as well as, or better than, the quill, yet their pictorial representations of the Golden State are less familiar. This visual collection, however, is as substantial and significant as the body of French travel literature. French images of California date to 1786, with the first sketch of California by the artist Duche de Vancy, who sailed from France with Captain Theoura Laperouse. They include such treasures as DuhautCilly's views of California settlements outside Monterey, and the first view of Yerba Buena, renamed San Francisco, owed to the brush of French Swiss sea-captain and watercolorist Jean-Jacques Vioget. In many cases, however, accounts of the artists' lives remain largely obscure or have been perpetuated with factual errors. Others have fallen into oblivion.

Bringing these pictures and biographical sketches together gives a better idea of how Californian and French cultures met, and how they defined each other. The longer a man is out of his own country, the stronger his ties to it, said Captain Duhaut-Cilly. French travelers-writers and artists alike-- described California in terms of what was familiar to them, be it the abundance of mistletoe in its oak trees, the fantastic vision of Santa Barbara mission as a gothic castle, or the soft, glittering colors of the California quail.

Many French travelers and immigrants experienced a special rapport with California, sometimes with Indians; always, it seems, with the Californios. At mid-nineteenth century, they flocked to California's gold mines earlier and in greater numbers than did most other Europeans. The French largely outnumbered the Chinese in the early days of the Gold Rush. Later still, they brought with them an artistic legacy and habitual bohemian lifestyle that helped shape the Golden State's budding art community. Toward the end of the century, the sons of early pioneers to California revisited their dual cultural roots by studying in Paris and painting in California. Young Ernest de Saisset, for example, torn between his two countries, wrote to his father from Paris in 1890, "I wish, my dear Father, that my country might not be further away than London, or even than New York."

This article is adapted from Splendide Californie! Impressions of the Golden State by French Artists, 1786-1900 (Book Club of California, 2001). The selections presented here, among the most memorable and significant images of California, begin with the observations of daring French sea captains who risked their own and their crews' lives to explore the little-known waters of the Pacific. They sought new outlets for trade, conducted scientific investigations, and challenged the weakening Spanish presence in the West. The educated French public of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries hungered for tales of exploration to uncharted parts of the world. Reports of these scientific voyages were popular and were a source of prestige for the explorers. The professional draftsmen and illustrators who accompanied French-sponsored expeditions around the world were instructed, according to one account, to execute "portraits of the natives of the different countries, their dresses, ceremonies, games, buildi ngs, boats and vessels, and all the productions of the sea and land," to enhance written descriptions of the places visited. [1]

This is how some of the earliest views of California happened to be drawn by French artists. Since such pictures were intended principally to document observations and voyages, artists' attention to detail became valuable from a historical point of view. Three of these rare images are particularly note-worthy: the first recorded view of California, by Duche de Vancy in 1786; and the first two views of settlements outside the ports of Monterey and San Francisco, by Duhaut-Cilly in 1827 and 1828.

The earliest visual record of exploration to the California coast was created by Gaspard Duche De Vancy (1756-1788), who traveled around the world aboard one of two ships commanded by Count Galaup de Laperouse. The young Frenchman, penniless despite his noble lineage, had studied art under Joseph Vien, a renowned neo-classicist painter in Paris. Duche de Vancy's family connections led to his opportunity to sketch Queen Marie Antoinette from life, although without official permission. [2] He became a court artist, frequently painting women's portraits, love scenes, and promenades or coach rides in the manner of Antoine Watteau, a far cry from the scenes and characters that he later encountered in his travels around the world.

In August 1785 de Vancy left Brest, France, aboard Laperouse's ship La Boussole. It was a prestigious assignment, as King Louis XVI was an avid geographer who spared no effort or expense in the hope of making Laperouse's voyage the best exploration to date of uncharted parts of the world. [3] During the expedition, de Vancy was assisted by two natural history draftsmen, Guillaume Prevost and his nephew Jean-Louis Prevost, whose ornithological sketch of a pair of California quail, shown here, remains the earliest known European record of California wildlife. From Brest the Laperouse expedition sailed to South America, Hawaii, and Alaska before heading south again to Monterey in September of 1786. The group's assignment was to sail routes never before followed by previous navigators, "in order to multiply discoveries and to considerably advance the great work of the complete description of the terrestrial globe." [4] De Vancy's undertaking appears particularly important in that light. His instructions reveal t hat he was obliged to turn all of his drawings over to Count de Laperouse at the end of the voyage.

The young artist produced a great number of sketches during the expedition's first year of exploration. Only fourteen of the drawings found their way back to France, however. Although the count forwarded journals, maps, and drawings from Macao, Kamchatka, and Botany Bay, the greater part of the expedition's documents apparently was lost in the wreck of the two ships at Vanikoro in the South Seas, north of New Hebrides. One of the sketches that remained in California, of Carmel Mission in 1786, survived. The original was very likely presented to the padres, probably as a token of appreciation for their hospitality.

Many years later, "the English captain [Frederick William] Beechey, passing through Monterey, offered a rather considerable sum for this picture," reported Captain Abel Dupetit-Thouars in 1837, "but Father Don Ramon, the superior of the mission, refused to sell it." Indeed, Beechey mentioned in his own journal that he "much wished to possess this valuable relic, with which however the padre was unwilling to part." [5] The "relic," as Beechey called the drawing, had been made when the mission was only sixteen years old. The work is the oldest known view of a California site. One can hardly wonder that the padres would not part with de Vancy's sketch. It captured a momentous event in their lives and those of the Monterey colonists: the first time the isolated settlement had allowed a foreign (i.e., non-Spanish) ship to anchor in the bay.

There was much excitement and activity during the French explorers' ten-day visit. The visitors were guests at celebratorious dinners at the Spanish governor's house, and reciprocated with entertainment aboard La Boussole and L'Astrolabe, and enjoyed horseback rides through the coastal hills. When word later reached the mission that the two ships had disappeared, the sketch may have become even more precious to the padres. De Vancy's sketch, however, vanished sometime after secularization of the missions in the 1830s. Two copies of it were made before its disappearance. One was attributed to Tomas de Suria; the other, shown here, to Jose Cardero. In 1791 both artists had visited Monterey with Italian navigator Alejandro Malaspina.

Following de Vancy's sketch, the next French views of California were also sketches, the work of the French navigator Auguste Bernard Duhaut-Cilly. Born in Saint-Malo in 1790, he had begun his maritime career at age seventeen under the command of the famous royal corsair Robert Surcouf. He spent seven years in the Royal Navy, and then joined the merchant marine. He captained several ships on extensive trading trips to Brazil, Havana, and Buenos Aires before taking command of Le Heros for a trading voyage around the world.

After sailing to Rio de Janeiro, Valparaiso, and Mazatlan, Le Heros reached San Francisco on January 26, 1827. In order to sell his cargo, Captain Duhaut-Cilly called at the ports of San Diego, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and San Pedro, stopping at the missions and pueblos, and later spent several weeks at Fort Ross. The resourceful Duhaut-Cilly disposed of his cargo at good prices, all the while making abundant notes on the places and people he visited. His detailed, lively account of his dealings with the Californians covers a range of subjects, from bear hunts and earthquakes to harvests at the missions. He drew coastal maps and sketched three settlements that he visited: Monterey, San Luis Rey, and Ross. The views, demonstrating his skills as a draftsman, are so detailed that they served as models in restoration of the sites. Greatly impressed by the buildings of Mission San Luis Rey, he noted, "At the distance we were from it, and in the uncertain light of dawn, this edifice, of a very beautiful design, su pported by numerous pillars, had the look of a palace." Monterey, however, did not live up to his expectations as California's capital. He wrote:

"One should not expect to see a considerable city upon arriving here; such an idea might deceive anyone as to where the right anchorage is. The first buildings one sees upon rounding Point Pinos are those of the presidio; they form a square of two hundred meters on each side, and since they have only a ground floor, look merely like long storehouses, roofed with tiles. To the right of the Presidio, about forty houses of rather pretty appearance are scattered about a small verdant plain, also roofed with tiles and whitewashed outside. That is, with as many thatched huts, what the capital of Upper California consists of." [6]

Duhaut-Cilly returned to France with all of his crewmen alive and well--a matter of great pride for him--and then published his abundant notes in 1834 and 1835, including in them the first known sketches of San Luis Rey and the fortified Russian hamlet at Ross. The report was well received and earned the Breton traveler the prestigious Legion d'Honneur award.

A decade passed before thirty-three-year-old Lt. Francois Edmond Paris stopped at Monterey in 1839, on his third world voyage under Capt. Cyrille Pierre Theodore Laplace. Paris had shown great skill as a seaman, hydrographer, and artist aboard L'Astrolabe, under the command of Dumont d'Urville in 1826-1829, which led to his appointment to Captain Laplace. When they reached California on the fifty-two-gun frigate L'Artemise, Laplace and his officers called at Bodega, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Monterey. By then Carmel mission was old and abandoned, its high roofs and walls crumbling away.

One might have expected a formal sketch of the mission from a lieutenant trained at the Navy School of Angouleme, and indeed, Paris's original watercolor of the mission has an almost photographic quality, despite its small size. Yet the details that he chose to represent, together with the painting's light, delicate hues and composition, transform what could have been a mere rendering into an evocative scene. Laplace, an excellent artist himself, recognized Paris's talent. His official, six-volume report, Campagne de Circumnavigation de la Fregate l'Aremise pendant les Annees 1837, 1838, 1839 et 1840, contains more than twenty lithographed views and sketches by the lieutenant, from the coasts of Africa and India to those of Asia and the Philippines. Paris's watercolor of the Carmel mission was also reproduced in lithographic form for the publication.

His world voyages behind him, Paris captained half a dozen ships, from corvettes to steamers, and served in the Crimean War and the siege of Sebastopol. He received many official honors and, upon retirement as a vice-admiral in 1871, was appointed director of the Musee de la Marine du Louvre and elected to--and later made a president of--the prestigious Academy of Sciences. He died in Paris at the age of eighty-seven. [7]

While French voyages to the Pacific in the early nineteenth century were generally carried out as trade missions, in the 1830s a surge of voyages again sought primarily scientific, rather than commercial, exploration. One of the notable artists of this later period was Louis Jules Masselot. Born in 1815 in Roches-sur-Rognon, a small village in northeastern France, Masselot studied at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. In 1836 he was appointed to serve under the command of Capt. Abel Aubert Dupetit-Thouars. The expedition left Brest in 1836 for a scientific voyage to the Pacific and around the world. After stopping at the principal ports along the coast of South America, the Venus reached Monterey, Alta California, in October 1837.

The expedition spent nearly a month in Monterey and then sailed south to Mazatlan, returning to France in 1839. During the voyage, sketches were made by Masselot and Romuald Georges Menard, another young officer. The expedition's substantial report, Voyage autour du Monde sur la Fregate Venus pendant les annees 1836-1839, was published from 1840 to 1864. It consisted of eleven volumes of text and four folio atlases, including an Atlas Pittoresque of about one hundred hand-colored engravings, including sketches of California and California Indians. According to the captain, Masselot executed "most faithful renderings" of the costumes, two of which are shown here, of the peoples they met. [8]

The expansion of worldwide trade in the early nineteenth century and the collapse of the Napoleonic empire encouraged other Frenchmen to travel far from home in quest of personal fortune. Many drifted to the Pacific and settled in South America and Mexico. French whalers and traders, such as Jean-Jacques Vioget, began arriving in California's ports when the Spanish territory lost its colonial hold and opened to foreign trade. French settlers from Mexico and Latin America trickled north, as did Victor Prudon, who came overland with the Hijar-Padres colonists. [9] Their relatively large numbers by the 1840s led to the establishment of a French consulate at Monterey. The first consul, Louis Gasquet, arrived in May of 1845. The second, Jacques Moerenhout, appointed in 1847, was an excellent artist.

Very few artists depicted California during this period. Those who did were generally either self-taught or trained as military observers. The French artists in California during this period, many of whom were settlers, had generally received some training as draftsmen or artists. Moerenhout, for example, was apprenticed in drawing and architecture. Another was Jean-Jacques Vioget, who had apprenticed to a naval officer. He painted an early watercolor of Yerba Buena in 1837 and became an important early resident of the hamlet. Victor Prevost had sketched for French and American news magazines, and Charles Guillou had been educated as a doctor.

An exception was the artist Henri Penelon. Self-taught, he came to California slightly later than many of the others of this period. Bypassing the lure of the Gold Rush, he would become the favorite portraitist of California families as their era of grandeur came to a close. Penelon chose Los Angeles over San Francisco when he arrived from his native Lyon, France, sometime during the late 1840s or early 1850s. He became the pueblo's first resident artist, and in an 1854 directory he was listed as a painter. [10] His patrons and subjects were for the most part members of prominent Californio families of southern California, such as Don Antonio Maria Lugo, Don Vicente Lugo, and Don Jose Antonio Carrillo.

Such men felt a kinship with the French, perhaps in part because of their common religion and related languages. One Californio whom Penelon painted, Don Antonio Labory, was in fact a Frenchman from Bordeaux whose birth name was Antoine Laborie. He had come to California in 1844 to work with vintner Jean-Louis Vignes, also known as Don Luis del Aliso. [11] Penelon also painted Laborie's father-in-law, Jose Andres Sepulveda.

Penelon's portraits bear the rigidity of the self-taught artist, but they are evocative of his subject's characters. He represented the wealthy and prominent Don Vicente Lugo (shown here and on the front cover), in the courtly pose of a nobleman. Wearing an elaborate, traditional costume adorned in silver, and painted astride his horse, Lugo exemplifies the powerful Californio at the height of his glory. The artist continued painting portraits until perhaps 1873, when he began working in photography. In February 1874, on the eve of his return to Los Angeles from a brief photography trip to Prescott, Arizona Territory, he suddenly died. [12] His portraits of early Californians, capturing a short-lived era, hold significant historical value.

At nearly the same time that Penelon established himself in southern California, the artist Charles Henri Victor Provost arrived in Yerba Buena and created perhaps the best known images of that little settlement. Prevost depicted it at two early stages in its transformation from Spanish outpost to cosmopolitan center. The Frenchman, born in 1820 in La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France, had studied art in Paris under Paul de la Roche and Horace Vernet. According to a biographical note written by his son in 1901, Prevost sailed to New York in 1848, the same year he married his wife, Louise Beraud. Their first child, Emmanuel, was born in May 1850. [13] Because the record fails to confirm his presence in California in 1847 or 1849, his depictions of Yerba Buena from this time present a mystery. It is possible that while in New York he drew on stone two views of San Francisco, one showing the small village in 1847, the other showing it in January of 1849, when, renamed San Francisco, it had started to gro w. For these drawings on stone, Victor Prevost, as he signed himself, may have artfully copied a sketch done by some other visitor to California in those years. The oil painting of Yerba Buena, dated 1847, closely resembles Prevost's 1847 drawing. Prevost's family believed the oil painting was from his brush.

Prevost also lithographed two San Francisco views shown here. They both bear the line "Entered according to the act of Congress in the year 1849 by Robert Wells," which suggests that both were created and copyrighted at the same time, perhaps to document the city's rapid changes. They were lithographed by the New York firm of Sarony and Major, for whom Prevost worked in the 1850s. During this period, he also sold scenes of New York life to French newspapers such as L'Illustration.

During a visit to France in 1853, Prevost studied the new art form of photography under the pioneering photographer Gustave Le Grey. When Prevost returned to New York, he traded his brush for a camera and began experimenting with the calotype process, a waxed-paper process that he introduced to America. When it failed commercially, Prevost returned to painting and drawing, which he taught, along with physics, at Madame H. D. Chegaray's Institute for young ladies in New York City. During the 1860s and 1870s, he operated a boarding school at Fort Washington, in upstate New York.

Thousands of Frenchmen ruined by their nation's political turmoil were lured to California's gold fields between 1849 and 1854. Immigration companies hastily formed in Paris to facilitate the departure of these Argonauts and to speculate on the gold that they would mine in California. Investors bought stock in the companies that chartered ships, booked passages, and organized small armies of French miners who were sworn to bring back a percentage of the profits reaped from their prospecting. Up to ninety such companies existed between 1849 and 1852, and fierce competition to capture the public's imagination and business was reflected in their names: "The Golden " "The Golden Hive," "The Seine & the Sacramento," "The Californienne," "The Fortune," and the like. [14]

Some artists, such as Louis Jules Rupalley, sketched or painted for pleasure, recording colorful experiences in the land of gold. Others, such as Ernest Narjot, created nostalgic reminders of the grand gold-rush adventure long after placer mining had ceased, while Antoine Claveau specialized in painting costly panoramas and large-scale scenes.

All of these companies failed. They lacked cohesion, initially during the six-month voyage around the Horn, and on arrival in California they succumbed to the chaotic world of San Francisco. In the mines, each man soon realized he must fend for hi mself. The companies' aggressive advertising, however, had lured an enormous number of Frenchmen to California, many with entrepreneurial skills. Among them were many kinds of performers and artists, whose talents were profitable. Artists who painted signage, for example, were paid an ounce of gold per letter for a shopkeeper's sign; sketchers sold work to lithographic firms that produced lettersheets, a form of illustrated stationery that sold for a dollar or two, and on which miners wrote to friends in the East.

An avid traveler, thirty-nine-year-old Rupalley, a native of Dozuley, near Caen, in Normandy, signed up for passage to California with "Le Mineur," one of the numerous Paris-based immigration companies. [15] The ship Le Louis left Le Havre on September 4, 1850, Rupalley serving as one of the expedition's leaders. He made his first drawings off the coast of Madeira and in Antarctic waters near Cape Horn. After he and his companions landed in San Francisco in February of 1851, according to the notes in his scrapbook, Rupalley worked for a time as a painter and decorator for a Mr. Mulnchaer, whose large house in North Beach, identified as "near the small laguna," later became the American Hospital. [16]

After traveling briefly through the mines, Rupalley settled in the small boomtown of Greenwood, north of Coloma. This site may have been the inspiration for Monte, shown here, a lively gambling scene that Rupalley composed and sketched circa 1850. Gathered around a small table and game of monte stands a motley crowd of adventurers, among them a mountain man in buckskins, a card shark, a Chinese immigrant, and a Mexican dressed in the traditional sarape and sombrero. [17]

Rupalley spent nearly seven years roaming through the foothills. Pursuit of gold was not his only interest, however. He was an assiduous botanist who executed nearly a hundred sketches of California plants and insects. He obviously consulted Indian tribesmen about local flora, giving Indian names to flowers that he drew. His scrapbook includes a portrait of a young California Indian woman accompanied by his wrenching comment "sixteen years old, costs a pound of hunting powder and a bottle of brandy." [18]

Rupalley left California in 1857 aboard the French ship Surprise, and the last sketches in his scrapbook are views of coasts of South America. He gathered in that large book lettersheets and newspaper clippings that he annotated, as well as his own sketches of plants and landscapes. In France, Rupalley resumed a quiet life, raising his family and serving as tax collector for the city of Caen. The circumstances and date of his death have not been located.

Another prolific French artist who also visited California and spent time at the mines was Ernest Etienne Narjot. Born December 15, 1826, in Saint-Malo, a city of great French corsairs, the adventurous twenty-three-year-old, who had begun art studies in Paris at a very young age, was swept into the early excitement of the Gold Rush and left for California in 1849. [19] By 1851 the Breton was mining at Foster's Bar, near Downieville, in the Northern Mines. There he painted his only factual rendering of the mines, a view of a waterwheel operation. Its documentary quality is notable when compared to his later paintings of the Gold Rush, executed in the 1880s, which rely heavily on reminiscence. In 1852 Narjot joined a French expedition to Sonora, Mexico. Hundreds of French miners, Narjot among them, had become disenchanted with gold mining and next sought their fortune in Mexico's northern province under banners of two French aristocrats, the Marquis de Pindray and Count de Raousset-Boulbon. They planned to tak e silver mines from the Apache Indians, establish an agricultural colony, and create settlements that would act as a buffer between the United States and Mexico. The undertaking failed. [20]

Narjot remained in Sonora, settling on a ranch in Metape, and marrying Santos Ortiz. He continued to paint, producing numerous illustrations of border life and battle scenes in Mexico and Arizona, some of which still survive. Narjot's lightest canvases, the ones most filled with breeze and sunlight, depict ranch life in the Mexican province. Uncertain international politics, however, including Emperor Maximilian's overthrow, prompted the Narjots to take Santos's mother and return to San Francisco in 1866.

There the artist opened a studio at 621 Clay Street, accepting all commissions in order to survive. Among them were a sketch of the centennial celebration of the birth of Napoleon I that he did for the San Francisco News in August 1869, and a portrait of much-loved Catholic Archbishop Jose Sadoc Ale-many, a man so modest that he would not pose, even for his friend. Narjot was forced to do the portrait from memory after studying the archbishop's features in the course of their meetings. [21]

The founding of the San Francisco Art Association in March 1871 strengthened the art community and formed the city's cultural heart. Founding members included Juan B. Wandesforde, Thomas Hill, Gideon J. Denny, William Keith, French architect Pietro Mezzara, French-Canadian engraver Edward Bosqui, and Narjot. [22] Narjot's commissions for portraits, landscapes, figures, and genre paintings increased, and he also undertook book illustration, creating twenty-four sketches for Col. Albert S. Evans's Ala California: Sketches of Life in the Golden State, published in San Francisco in 1873. He did extensive fresco work for churches and public institutions, and in 1885 taught the male life-class at the California School of Design. He exhibited regularly and was a faithful contributor to Art Association and Mechanics' Institute exhibitions and agricultural fairs. By the late 1880s Ernest Narjot was considered one of California's most accomplished painters.

He maintained his French connections, doing a portrait of French President Adolphe Thiers and contributing at least three pictures to the French Relief Fund during the Franco-Prussian War, all exhibited at French-Canadian Henri Payot's bookstore in San Francisco. Narjot also did portraits of several French pioneers, including those of M. Friant, Xavier Van de Casteele and his wife, Henrietta. He traveled widely throughout California in search of subjects, painting views of San Francisco, Mann, Sonoma, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, New Almaden, Santa Monica, and Santa Catalina Island.

The magical lore of his native Brittany influenced Narjot's art, especially in his portrayal of women like Andromeda and Ophelia. He received a gold medal at the 1883 California State Agricultural Fair for a four-panel screen depicting mythical maidens--a Druid priestess, Spanish and Chinese women, and Caroline, "Princess of the Panamints." He took a silver medal at the fair the following year for a canvas based on the Bret Harte tale "Miggles," depicting an unlettered girl tending to an old friend wasting away from disease.

Family legend held that before coming to California in 1849, Narjot had visited old Druid sites in Wales and the monoliths at Stonehenge. The artist himself believed that his most outstanding work was The Sacrifice of a Druid Priestess, which he painted in 1881. In 1890 Narjot painted a self-portrait that posed him in front of an empty canvas, palette and brush cast on the floor, musing absent-mindedly against a backdrop of various mementos of his adventures in California and Mexico. The next year, after an absence of twenty-five years, Narjot made a return trip to Sonora. There he received a number of commissions for portraits and landscapes. [23]

Now at the zenith of his career, Narjot's last honor was a commission to paint a fresco that would decorate the Leland Stanford tomb on the grounds of Stanford University. During this work, paint fell into the artist's eyes, severely damaging his eyesight. Although he continued to paint after the loss of eyesight in one eye, he suffered irreversible mental and emotional decline. By 1894 he could scarcely walk without assistance. His wife, who spoke English poorly, barely kept the family together by selling Narjot's paintings. [24] When a San Francisco Call journalist alerted the community to the artist's misfortune, in January 1897, thirty prominent California artists came to Narjot's aid with a benefit sale of their work. Among them were William Keith, Thomas Hill, Arthur Mathews, and Narjot's former pupil, Amedee Joullin.

Narjot died the following year, on August 24, 1898. [25] His funeral service was held at Notre Dame des Victoires church in San Francisco. Most of Narjot's unsold paintings, which were held at the San Francisco Art Association, were destroyed during the earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906. The few that were saved were exhibited at Raphael Weill's department store, the White House. The Leland Stanford fresco and tomb that had been so costly to Narjot also were destroyed in the Great Fire.

After a stay in the mines long enough to "see the elephant," many French artists returned to ever-crowded, ever-rowdy, cosmopolitan San Francisco, a choice subject for their art. Some, such as Frederic (Fritz) Wickersheim and Antoine-Thoedore t'Scharner, recorded sights of the boomtown in personal sketchbooks. Others, among them J. J. Rey, Alexandre Edouart, Antoine Claveau, Adrien Coquardon, and Edward Jump, also found that they could make a better living with pen and brush than with pick and shovel.

As San Francisco's French community expanded in size and activity and its businessmen thrived, French entrepreneurs became patrons of the arts. French-speaking pioneers often worked together and supported each other's enterprises. Rey's lithographic and printing firm actively represented artists such as Coquardon (noted for a sketch of Weaverville), sometimes hiring them outright, as they did Xavier Van de Casteele. [26] French-Canadian printers Henry Payot and Edward Bosqui also favored French businesses and artists' work, producing their business stationery, stock certificates, and special publications.

Few Frenchmen, however, endeared themselves more to San Franciscans than did Edouard Jump. Born on rue du Faubourg du Roule in Paris on February 8, 1831, he was the son of Josephine Mequin and John Jump, a foreign language teacher whose name was often misspelled as "Jomp" in the Parisian business directories of the late 1840s. Edouard Jump, caught up in the California gold-rush excitement, left Le Havre aboard the British ship William Money, reaching San Francisco on November 10, 1851. He headed for Stockton aboard the Kate Kearney and worked briefly in the placers of the Tuolumne River. Like many of his compatriots, however, the twenty year old seemed to feel more at ease in San Francisco, to which he soon returned.

Young Jump, whose talent with portraits and cartoons had impressed some of the Money's passengers, found employment with lithographers Benjamin Butler and Louis Nagel, who taught him the rudiments of their art. [27] Publisher James Hutchings soon noticed the young Frenchman's talent and in 1857 made him his companion-sketcher on a trip to the Fall River (Shasta County) waterfalls. Increasingly confident in his art, Jump developed a highly individual style of satirical group scenes that brought him recognition as the "Prince of Cartoonists." He was particularly skillful at reproducing likenesses of men and women after only a glance. Faces that were more difficult to render he was said to sketch on his thumbnails to consign them to memory. His Steamer Day in San Francisco group scene captures the frenzy that seized San Franciscans twice each month, when scheduled steamers arrived from or sailed for the East Coast.

Another of Jump's famous San Francisco group scenes, Earth quakey Times, came out after the jolt that shook the city on October 8, 1865. Five days later, his sketch was already advertised for sale in the San Francisco Morning Call: "Buy one, everybody," a reporter enjoined, "and smile." Indeed, several bathers at the North Beach Sanitarium Bath House had run out of the building "in the severely classic costume in vogue in the Garden of Eden before the introduction of fig-leaf aprons," the Alta California reported, and Jump was there to catch them, as he was another woman who ran screaming into the street, carrying something that "at first was taken for a dressed chicken," but turned out to be her infant. A grumpy San Francisco journalist predicted, "We anticipate hearing that Jump has been arrested for libel" since so many celebrities were among his victims. San Franciscans, fortunately, had a good sense of humor. [28]

While he lived in San Francisco, Jump created satirical illustrations for the magazine Puck; advertising lithographs such as his Squarza's Drinks scene; watercolor sketches of popular establishments; landscapes such as Rancho Los Meganos, prepared for James T. Sanford of New York, and a town view, Crystal Peak, for J. V. Hollingsead. He even may have produced a still-life oil that bears his signature, recently in the collection of the late Edan Hughes. The popular Jump left the city in the late 1860s, distributing copies of a self-portrait entitled The Last Jump, in which he rises above a busy city street in a hot-air balloon, long-haired and bearded in the same manner that he represented himself, complete with palette and easel, in another of his most famous sketches, San Francisco at the Fair.

In the late 1860s Jump settled in Washington, D.C., as had another San Francisco favorite, Mark Twain, who, as a correspondent for the Alta California, wrote that "Jump the caricaturist, of San Francisco, is here as artist for Frank Leslie's. He has made a water-color sketch of Pennsylvania Avenue, which is attracting a good deal of attention ... This is just the city for Jump, where the faces of the nation's distinguished men are so familiar. In this picture ... [are] portraits of Seward, Welles, Banks, Spinner, Horace Greeley, General Butler, Charles Sumner, Grant, Sherman,... and others.... The execution is excellent, and the hits are good." [29]

Twain and Jump boarded at the same house in Washington. These two solid craftsmen with an uncanny eye for the satirical planned to join talents to produce a book about the Sandwich Islands, although ultimately the project did not materialize. [30] A newly married Jump and his wife left Washington for Montreal, where the Frenchman attempted to launch an illustrated newspaper that eventually failed. Their now-itinerant life took the couple to New Orleans, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and other western and southern cities where he met with continuing success as illustrator, portrait painter, and cartoonist, always able to command a large salary and extra money for sketches. Jump also reportedly received large sums of money from his family in Paris, at one time as much as $3,000 in gold. [31] The talented, convivial artist had a fondness for liquor, however, and three years after he and his wife settled in Chicago in 1880, a distraught Jump took his own life, leaving behind his wife and daughter. [32]

Perhaps the most familiar pair of names in San Francisco illustrations is that of the team of Britton and Rey, who formed a successful lithographic business in the nineteenth century. Jacques Joseph Rey was born in Bouxwiller, a small Alsatian town at the foot of the Vosges mountains northeast of Strasbourg. The young Alsatian studied drawing and lithography and was accomplished in music and languages long before he reached California. He was said to possess charm and humor as well. Little wonder that he was hired, when still a young man, as a traveling companion to a nobleman wishing to visit Russia. [33]

Rey left France in 1850, the year his father died, reaching San Francisco via Panama. In 1852 he met Yorkshireman Joseph Britton, with whom he founded the lithographic firm of Britton & Rey. Britton generally was responsible for the business aspects of the firm, although he could sketch and draw on stone when necessary. Rey did much of the artistic work and it was with pen and paper in hand that the Frenchman visited the mines. Over the years he compiled an unequaled record of life during the California Gold Rush, from views of small mining towns like Scott's Bar and French Bar to the booming city of San Francisco, from ironic descriptions of the joys and sorrows of the miner's adventures to depictions of floods and seasonal hardships in the young state.

Together Britton and Rey became the largest and most successful producers of lithographic work in California, a west-coast counterpart to Currier & Ives. Their friendship was further cemented by Rey's marriage to Britton's sister Jane Ann. A bachelor all his life, Britton shared the Reys large San Francisco home, the site of many artistic gatherings.

A large part of the vast Britton & Rey collection consisted of pictorial lettersheets, but their activities extended to many other forms of lithographic work, including billheads, checks, and stock certificates for mining companies. They associated with other French artists and businessmen too, for example, printing Adrien Coquardon's 1852 sketch of Weaverville; and mining stock certificates for tycoon Francois A. Pioche and journalist Etienne Derbec. The firm also executed a finely detailed, panoramic view of Santa Cruz, shown here. With the development of color printing, Britton & Rey became one of the earliest firms to produce actual postcards, mostly of California and San Francisco scenes. Although after Rey's death in 1892, Britton virtually ceased commercial printing activities, their legacy remains an aesthetic and fundamental aspect of California's visual history.

In Medieval times, the word "Bohemian" was used to describe the Celtic people of Bohemia, and later it broadened to include nomadic people assumed to be from Bohemia. By the seventeenth century, the word applied to anyone with an irregular lifestyle; by the mid-nineteenth century it was solidly associated with the literary movement known as romanticism, and suggested the vagabond way of life, often the artist or student who also manifested hostility to "bourgeois" standards. The Bohemian was viewed as the antithesis of the stable, hard-working, somewhat dull, and materialistic "average" citizen.

Three French artists who appeared in California in the 1870s--Jules Frenzeny, Jules Tavernier, and Leon Trousset--were true Bohemians. Traveling through the western U.S., depicting the grandeur of landscapes newly seen after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, they easily lived in a vagabond manner. In 1874 the New York-based Harper brothers hired Frenzeny and Tavernier to sketch the American frontier for their magazine, Harper's Weekly. They provided a remarkable account of life in the western states, and when they reached California in the summer of 1874, they joined San Francisco's art community, becoming active members of the newly founded Bohemian Club.

Jules Tavernier's arrival in San Francisco reflected both his solid talent and determination to follow his trade. Born in Paris on April 27,1844, Jules Wilhelm Tavernier spent his early years in England. At age seven he moved back to Paris, later studying at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Felix Barrias, a specialist in Asian subjects. Tavernier exhibited his first two pictures at the Paris Salon in 1864 and contributed to the salon regularly until 1870. When the Franco-Prussian War erupted in July 1870, Tavernier enlisted with the 84th Battalion, the famous Artists' Volunteer Brigade. [34] As soon as the war ended, he went briefly to London and then sailed to New York. Soon after, he began collaborating with his former art school friend Paul Frenzeny.

On their transcontinental sketching journey for Harper's in 1874, Tavernier produced resplendent oils of Indian villages, such as Red Cloud's encampment in Wyoming, and other sketches and watercolors that the partners sold along the way to supplement their incomes. Their engravings of settlers fighting fires or windstorms, Indian raids, cattle drives, ghost towns, and scenes of frontier law attracted much attention, and the two artists were well known by the time they reached the West Coast in the summer of 1874. [35]

The flow of Comstock silver by the late 1860s and the wealth resulting from completion of the transcontinental railroad had turned San Francisco into an artist's haven. The blue-eyed Tavernier, who never lost his French accent, was short, healthy-looking, excitable, and charismatic, filled with a contagious joie de vivre. His first studio, in true Bohemian style, was a simple loft over a macaroni factory in North Beach. But in 1875, the restless artist found more inspirational scenery in Monterey.

While other artists of the period sought grand or sweeping vistas, such as those of Yosemite Valley, Tavernier explored the undiscovered Camel and Monterey area, attracting wide attention to the region and founding its first art colony there in 1875. "Few people [then] thought of Monterey as a health resort or as a picturesque paradise," wrote journalist Deejay Mackart. "They flocked to Santa Cruz, where there were firm sands and combing breakers to delight surf-bathers, but 20 miles southward across the bay nobody dreamed of going for pleasure. The road to Point Cypress was enough to break the heart of the driver.... Tavernier was accustomed to camping in this wonderful oasis, and two of his finest and most imaginative pictures were produced from impressions here gathered. [36]

Tavernier showed what could be done with quiet scenery, such as every mile affords along the Californian coast. Numbers of painters afterward turned to Monterey as to a spiritual center. Tavernier was indeed a great artist, but his failing was an aversion to labor. He painted grand pictures in the air with his thumb and grew enthusiastic over their potential value, but it was not until the screws of material existence had tightened upon him to the last thread that he would put these inspirations on canvas. Then he would slam his studio door and seat himself before a canvas, which would forthwith begin to bloom with ravishing form and color.

His quarters on Alvarado Street, the first art studio in Monterey, became a mecca for visiting artists and writers. Besides Frenzeny, the circle included Julian Rix, Joe and Isobel Strong, Gideon Jacques Denny, William Keith, Leon Trousset, and poet Charles Warren Stoddard. But in late 1878, his series of satirical illustrations of Monterey citizenry appeared in a San Francisco newspaper, offending many of the Monterey townspeople. Tavernier's celebrated presence in the seacoast town quickly tarnished, and he returned to San Francisco, immediately immersing himself in the fast-paced art community there. He became vice president of the San Francisco Art Association and a founder of the San Francisco Palette Club, a dissident and short-lived group that protested what it considered low selection standards for Art Association exhibits. Tavernier also was art manager of the first Authors' Carnival given in San Francisco. [37] In 1880 he moved into a former courtroom on Montgomery Street, converted into a large, l ight studio. It became the heart of Bohemia, a meeting place where artists and other luminaries of the San Francisco art scene were invited twice a week, and where legendary parties were thrown, the grandest of all when the Taverniers and the Strongs entertained the brilliant fish playwright Oscar Wilde. [38]

Tavernier, however, was plagued by his lack of self-discipline and his consequent perennial bad debts. When Joe and Isobel Strong decided to move to Honolulu, he elected to join them. By 1887 the Taverniers were settled in Oahu, where he and Strong shared a studio. [39] Tavernier was the first artist of high caliber to depict Hawaii, and he soon had a following of budding island artists. He painted tropical scenes--mountains, waterfalls, and shady pools--and his productivity was greatly enhanced by the beauty of the islands. But the volcano Kilauea on the island of Hawaii particularly kindled his imagination. He painted and sold scores of pictures of it, and planned to exhibit his large volcano panoramas across the United States. [40]

But misfortune and tragedy interceded. Tired of her husband's constant improvidence and of his growing drinking habit, Lizzie Tavernier returned to San Francisco. [41] Because Hawaiian law required that residents pay their debts before leaving the islands, Tavernier was prevented from following her back to California. His health had failed when he died on May 18, 1889, at age forty-five, alone in his studio on Hotel Street in Honolulu. His grave there is marked by "a rough granite block" shipped to the island by the Bohemian Club, to mark the passing of this "talented and extravagant little Frenchman who lived, painted and died by his own code of passionate intemperance." [42]

Little is known about the French artist Leon Trousset, whose career in California can be reconstructed only through his fine oil paintings, friendships, and bits of news gleaned from art sections of various newspapers. Although his earliest known works are pen and ink sketches done at Fort Davis, Texas, in 1867, the commissions that he obtained in California confirm his presence in the state by the early 1870s. His large oil on canvas, Moss Landing, was executed about 1873 in Castroville, where he was said to be related to the Vierras, one of the city's prominent families. [43] He also obtained commissions in Sonoma County, among them two watercolors of the Aguillon Winery, located in what today is the Salvador Vallejo Adobe at the intersection of Vallejo and Salvador streets on the town's central plaza. [44] In 1875 he painted View of Oakland across Lake Merritt before joining the Monterey Bohemian colony, where his forty-two-inch-long watercolor of Monterey originally hung in the artists' favorite tavern.

Never in one place for long, Trousset moved on to Castroville, where by February 1876 he was employed in "life-size religious paintings" for the city's church. He then went to Los Angeles, where he worked for the Cathedral of St. Vibiana in April, and back to Castroville in June with French fresco painter Alexander Zins. Returning to Monterey, the artist painted several images with historical themes, including Fr. Junipero Serra's first mass at his founding of the mission at Carmel, and Monterey-Father Serra's Landing Place, which hangs in the mission's museum entrance. Trousset's scattered works further trace his wanderings in the 1880s to New Mexico, Texas, and finally to Mexico, where he married, adopted a child, and settled permanently.

Christian-Henri Roullier was born in Lyon, France, in 1845, and was an infant when his parents arrived in gold-rush San Francisco. After much difficulty, Roullier senior found employment at the White House, a pioneer department store owned by a popular and successful French businessman, Raphael Weill. From then, the Roulliers' life took a prosperous turn. [45] Christian-Henri resided with his family in San Francisco at the beginning of his career. During the Franco-Prussian War he was listed, with other members of the city's French community, as a local subscriber to a French patriotic fund. He subsequently traveled to Paris to study painting with Jean-Leon Gerome the leading teacher of the day. He also studied sculpture with W. E. Fremiet and explored both media throughout his life.

A successful artist, Roullier exhibited widely in France. His work was included in most Paris Salon exhibits between 1878 and 1914. He exhibited at the San Francisco Art Association and the Mechanics' Institute of San Francisco in 1883, suggesting that he had returned to San Francisco, perhaps working with Jules Tavernier, whom he depicted in buckskin and knee-high boots in an oil entitled Tavernier Painting. Roullier probably joined the gregarious Tavernier in Monterey as well. Among his portraits, he executed two of Josiah Stanford, now in the collection at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.

When in France, Roullier and his sister Blanche spent half of their time in Paris, the remainder at a beautiful property the family bought in the small town of Saint-Nizier sous Charlieu, some ten miles from Roanne. Blanche became a successful pastellist who also exhibited at the French salons and received several awards. Like his friend and fellow-painter Armand Charnay, Roullier painted rustic, local scenes of his native region, except for a few canvases of Tunisia done in colors reminiscent of his California work. He died in Paris on July 25, 1926. A retrospective exhibit of his work was held at the 1926 Paris Winter Salon.

Between 1852 and 1870, under Napoleon III the city of Paris was transformed. Wide, gas-lit boulevards and public parks beautified old neighborhoods, and new quays and bridges rejuvenated the banks of the Seine. By the 1880s, France's capital had become the "City of Lights," a resplendent cultural and artistic hub for people from around the world. Students from many countries enrolled in Parisian art schools and studio workshops. They sought training at the government-run Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which offered tuition-free, highly structured instruction, or at private art schools such as the Academie Julian, an atelier run by Rodolphe Julian. [46] There, for a monthly fee, students could draw or paint from live models or take instruction from such masters as Gustave-Rodolphe Boulanger, Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, and Tony Robert-Fleury.

In the United States, the long-standing devotion to British art cooled in the excitement generated by Parisian art schools and the Paris Salon, an annual exhibition of France's most celebrated painters. The impressionist movement was in full bloom in France, and San Francisco, by now the undisputed art center of the West, was not immune to the general infatuation for French art. A large number of California artists sailed to France to study, swelling the ranks of American art students seeking French instruction. Among them were sons of French pioneers who had arrived with the Gold Rush and made California their home. These Franco-California artists renewed their French roots by studying at the Parisian schools, then taking their skills back to America. Such was the experience of four artists born in California between 1860 and 1867: Amedee Joullin, Eugene Pages, Eugene Taniere, and Ernest de Saisset. Their art blended two cultures, two sensitivities.

Amedee Joullin was born in San Francisco of French parents on June 13, 1862. Although his father, Etienne Joullin, wished to see him learn the printer's trade, Amedee studied art at the San Francisco School of Design under Virgil Williams for a year and a half, and then under Jules Tavernier for another year and a half. The young Joullin was Tavernier's constant companion for the two years he spent working in Tavernier's large studio. [47] Joullin received from his talented mentor inspiration for his later passion for Indian subjects, together with harsh lessons in perfection of technique that he would never forget. [48]

After his studies, in order to finance a trip to Paris he hired himself out as a scene-painter for the California Theater. From 1882 to 1884 he studied at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, holding first and second rank in his composition classes. Returning to San Francisco in 1885, he opened a studio at 207 Sansome, where he painted and taught. He spent the decade from 1887 to 1897 as an instructor at the San Francisco School of Design. He proved as demanding with his students as Tavernier had been with him, according to Canadian painter Emily Carr, who attended one of his still-life classes. Joullin and artist Emil Carlsen devoted many years to developing the school's curriculum.

Once the conception of a painting was fixed in his mind, Joullin completed his canvases very quickly. Like his mentor Tavernier, he was preoccupied with making color glow out of seemingly monochromatic or dark sceneries, like sand dunes or street scenes: His canvas French Poultry Market, of a dilapidated shop on Merchant street, was painted on an overcast day so he could explore the challenge of rendering a dark scene.

Turning to Chinatown, Joullin started a series of studies in 1888, fully exploring the subject in 1890 with his painting Interior of a Joss House, which brings out gleaming reflections of copper and brass objects against the room's general darkness. San Francisco Mayor James D. Phelan purchased the large canvas for a thousand dollars, the highest price yet paid for work by a local artist. It provoked hostility between Joullin and Theodore Wores, another artist who was also painting Chinese scenes at the time. The San Francisco News Letter of March 19, 1892, recorded the controversy, noting that "Artists who select similar subjects for their brush, are as sensitive of criticism as ladies of comment upon their complexions. There are two gentlemen in this city who have made a hit in their treatment of a certain class of work. One especially has been received in foggy England with much enthusiasm. ... The other who is talented but lazy as a gopher on a wet day, plunged into the same line, and sold a big picture. Now it is worth a mile's walk to hear the delicate manner in which they speak of their work...." [49]

Joullin next directed his interest to Mexican and Southwestern Indians. His series of Indian canvases dates to 1892. By 1897 he resigned his professorship at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art to paint in Mexico, creating Aztec temple scenes, landscapes, and interiors. When he returned to San Francisco, his work was hailed by critics, who wrote: "Amedee Joullin, the well-known artist and Bohemian, has returned to the city after an absence of many months in Mexico, where he was engaged in sketching subjects that will prove a novelty to lovers of art here. He is occupying the old studio of the late Jules Tavernier.... Mr. Joullin is not creating a new school of art. He has... sought a field that California artists have neglected, and it has proved prolific and interesting. All of his work [contains] ... the rich coloring of the Southern clime. He returns with the most flattering notices from the Mexican press." [50]

A few years later, Joullin traveled to New Mexico to record the life of the Pueblo Indians. Clearness and precision, together with his professed passion for color, gave Joullin's Indian canvases a tremendous sense of atmosphere. All found ready collectors, such as his The Weaver, which was purchased by Phoebe Hearst for $1,500. During the next several years, he exhibited variously at the National Academy of Design, the Union League Association in New York, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and the Societe des Artistes Francais in Paris. [51] In 1900 and 1906 he exhibited at the Paris Salon, receiving honorary French titles both times. With the success of his New York exhibit, he received the honor of the commission to paint the historic driving of the last spike of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The twenty-foot-long scene hangs today in the state capitol at Helena, Montana. [52]

In 1910, Joullin held his first collective exhibit at San Francisco's Helgesen galleries, showing nineteen large oil canvases and twelve smaller sketches of scenes in Paris, Mexico, and California, with the "eucalyptus trees, brown hillsides and sand dunes" of the bay area dominating. The exhibit attracted wide attention. Just before his final exhibit opened at the De Young Museum in 1917, Joullin died, following a brief illness. The memorial exhibit included nearly forty of his canvases. [53]

California-born Jules Eugene Pages settled in France after going to Paris to study art. Born in San Francisco in 1867, as the son of Jules Francois Pages, he had grown up in the fertile artistic milieu of his father's engraving studio where Julian Rix, Joe Strong, and Jules Tavernier often gathered. From his early days, Jules Eugene absorbed the principles of drawing, apprenticing to his father and then training at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute. He worked as an illustrator for the San Francisco Examiner, doing decorative designs, cartoons, portraits, and full-page illustrations such as his Bastille Day scene. With his savings, he was finally able to enroll in the exclusive Academie Julian in Paris, studying under Benjamin Constant and Jules Lefebvre, who became his friend. To support himself, he worked as an illustrator for the Monde Illustre. [54]

Whenever necessary, Pages took illustrating jobs to earn money for his Acedemie expenses. For a period, he illustrated for the San Francisco Examiner, and then was employed by William Randoph Hearst's The American in New York, where he was offered the direction of its art department. He declined that prestigious position, however, and in 1897, at age thirty-two, he won a gold medal at the Paris Salon for his Corner of the Studio. Family legend has it that he used some of the award money to build an "American-style" bathroom in his studio on Montmartre.

In 1902 he was appointed a professor at the Academie Julian--the first American to achieve that position. He remained in France for several years, working from his studio in Paris as well as from a studio-home on Brehat, off the northern coast of Brittany. He traveled and painted in Italy, Holland, Spain, and Belgium, and in 1905, at age thirty-eight, he won the "Hors Concours" medal, the most prestigious an artist could achieve. This honor entitled him to henceforth exhibit his works at the Salon without going through the pre-selection process. Only a few California artists had earned that high award before him. Pages, at thirty-five, became first assistant to eighty-year old instructor Jules Lefebvre, and was generally looked upon as the likely successor to the Academie's famed older artist.

Returning to San Francisco in June 1906 after the earthquake and fire, Jules Eugene created a large canvas entitled The Reconstruction of San Francisco, a testimony to the public spirit and citizens' courage after the devastation of their city. The view is from below the Bank of California, looking up and over the Merchant's Exchange. The painting, which measured twelve by six feet, caused a stir both at the Paris Salon of 1909 and later in San Francisco. "The spirit of San Francisco pervades the picture and strikes its own note, the familiar every day scene caught and depicted on canvas, for the future generations to see, rendering the painting one of the most striking of its day," commented one San Francisco newsman. [55]

Pages returned to Paris in October 1907, following the death of M. Julian, director of the Academie. The artist spent much time in Paris during this period, in order to meet his teaching and directing responsibilities at the Academie, which remained open during World War I. He sometimes went to the war zone to paint, and once found himself under fire while sketching. His oil of the Church at Saint-Gervais bears the mention (in French), "Church of Saint-Gervais, where a shell from "Bertha" exploded, Holy Friday, 1918." "Bertha" was the nickname of a powerful German cannon that had fired 350 shells on Paris between March 23 and August 9, 1918, named for Bertha Krupp, daughter of the German industrialist who had manufactured the weapon.

Despite his success in France, Pages always remained a Californian. He did not consider himself an expatriate, rather, one who worked in the environment most conducive to his best effort, as he remarked in an interview. During his visits to California, he arranged the shipment of student works from the San Francisco Art Institute to be sent to Academie Julian's competitions. As a result, some of those students obtained one-year scholarships in Paris. From Paris, Pages also shipped paintings to exhibits in San Francisco and Los Angeles on a regular basis.

When news of Pages gold medal for Corner of the Studio became known in San Francisco, Senator William Phelan, businessman Raphael Weill, and other prominent San Franciscans jointly purchased the painting, presenting it to the San Francisco Art Association to encourage young painters. Weill, owner of the White House department store, Bohemian Club member, and a first class chef, hosted a special dinner in Pages's honor in December 1906. The artist was later made an honorary member of the Bohemian Club. He also maintained friendships with members of the city's Cercle de l'Union, as well as with the Alliance Francaise. [56]

Pages had spent enough time painting in California that he was able to hold an exhibition exclusively devoted to his California paintings at the Steckel Galleries in March 1914. These included views of the Oakland harbor, San Francisco's Chinatown, Mission Creek, views of the waterfront, Indian villages around Los Angeles, and an unusual triptych of the Los Angeles skyline. His sweat-shops and factory searches for the ideal working-class model made news. He believed that working men and women--his favorite subjects--"speak more eloquently of the soul within." Pages selected as his model Adele Libby, described as "a sad, sweet-faced girl with the eyes, mouth and nose of a madonna."

In 1915, Pages became a member of the International Jury of Awards of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where he exhibited some of his own works. His Tower of Jewels canvas depicted one of the most popular of the Fair's pavilions. Many years later the San Francisco Chronicle noted that Pages had become recognized in France and other European countries as perhaps the finest portrayer of French life. Although he once defined impressionism as "the real renaissance of modern art," Pages was not considered an impressionist of the Monet school, but rather an artist with a very personal style, influenced by several different artists. Critic Antony Anderson described it as "a clean, direct and vivid impressionism, air and sunlight, a delightfully facile technique," while the noted Bohemian sculptor Haig Patigian called Pages a "sublimated impressionist. His subjects are unlimited, and he excels in figure composition, landscapes and paintings of types and localities with equal facility and grace." [56] Pag es believed that Californian artists expressed more individuality than European artists, and of his own work, like Joullin, he felt he could not paint his subjects properly unless he knew them. [57]

During World War II, Pages remained in Paris until forced from his home by the invasion of the Germans in 1941. In his seventies then, he returned to San Francisco, where he spent the final five years of his life. He lived until May 1946, when he was stricken by a heart attack in front of his Washington Street studio, only a few steps from the house of his birth.

California-born French artist Eugene Taniere, who studied at the California School of Design, was influenced by his instructor Amedee Joullin, who later sponsored him at the Academie Julian in Paris. Taniere's father, French Argonaut Etienne Taniere, had been among the four thousand Frenchmen to obtain free passage to California in the early 1850s under the "Golden Ingot" philanthropic lottery organized in Paris during the economic recession that coincided with the discovery of gold in California. Taniere senior also received some financial help from the French government when he arrived in San Francisco. He and his wife, Jeanne Helene Provost, opened a boarding house there, and later operated the Metropolitan Restaurant on Montgomery Street. Eugene, the youngest of their three children, was born in 1862. [58]

In 1867, the Taniere family moved to Dijon, France, where Eugene attended school sporadically--the precocious and independent-minded child ran away from school several times. Following the Franco-Prussian War, which stranded the family in France, they returned to California. Young Taniere developed an interest in painting and began studying art at the California School of Design while working with his older brother as a clerk for French merchants Sabatie & Company. In 1885, he left the city to study at the Academie Julian.

Taniere spent the next six years studying art in Paris. He left the Academie in 1891, the year the celebrated Henri Matisse enrolled there. Returning to San Francisco, Taniere opened a studio and resumed studies at the California School of Design. At the same time he gave art instruction to eleven-year-old Emile Roure, a student of French ancestry who later became an artist in Los Angeles. [59]

Taniere specialized in still-lifes, portraits, and painting intricate scenes on porcelain plates. His career began to blossom in 1891 when he exhibited seven paintings at the Twenty-sixth Industrial Exhibition of the Mechanics' Institute. The next few years were productive for Taniere, whom the Art Association called "an artist of great promise." But the thirty-three-year-old painter met an early death in an accident at the corner of Fulton and Fillmore streets. On March 28, 1895, he lost control of a racing bicycle that he had purchased that very day and crashed into a bituminous rock machine blocking the intersection.

For second-generation French artists who did not leave the United States to study abroad, such as Pauline Aimee Schoenmakers, fellow artists returning from Paris became cultural" links." Schoenmakers, who produced most of her work in the ten years from 1889 to 1899, painted more than a hundred fine canvases, portraits, still-lifes, and landscapes. Instructors such as Joullin, who taught French techniques at the California School of Design, influenced her work.

Born in San Francisco in 1867, to a Belgium father and French mother who had met in New Orleans before continuing west to California, Schoenmakers began sketching at age seventeen. Much of her encouragement came from her older half-sister, Julia Aimee. [60] Schoenmakers attended the California School of Design in the late 1880s, one of many women art students for whom the school made its life-size antique statue casts from France "presentable," by masking or removing the statues' "superfluous appendages." [61]

Schoenmakers explored many media before settling on oils and watercolors. Like Canadian painter Emily Carr, she took classes from Joullin, who taught at the School of Design between 1887 and 1897. [62] Their common fluency in the French language and culture no doubt made Schoenmakers receptive to his teaching. Her best pieces, in fact, were studies in metals, Joullin's particular strength. In 1894, at age twenty-seven, Schoenmakers received a bronze medal at the San Francisco Mid-Winter Fair for After the War, shown here, which depicts French weapons lying on a coffin draped with both an American and a French flag. That same year, Schoenmakers also was awarded an Avery gold medal by the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art for a painting of a French horn.

Like Joullin, painter Eugene Taniere was also a strong influence on her life and art. Her family and the Tanieres had become acquainted through the large Franco-American community in San Francisco, and the young artists, who were the same age, became close friends. Schoenmakers executed a portrait of Taniere as a young man. His abrupt death in March 1895, was a great blow to her.

At age twenty-eight, Schoenmakers retired as an artist. Her marriage to Christian H. Westphal in January 1899, and the birth of their first child in December of that year, marked the end of her artistic career. She never returned to painting, although she returned to the California School of Design in the 1930s to study sculpture. She lived in San Francisco until her death in 1946.

The son of a prominent Santa Clara pioneer family, Ernest Pierre de Saisset, born in 1864, first studied art at the University of Santa Clara, where he received a "Drawing Prize" for an oil painting in 1883. [63] In 1886, like many other young American artists of the period, he sailed to Paris to study at the Academie Julian. With the help of his paternal uncle, who lived in Paris, Ernest found a studio close to the Academie in the Faubourg Saint-Denis district. For nine years the young Californian studied under Bouguereau, Lefebvre, and their colleagues, learning to draw and paint from models and nature. His monthly expenses give evidence of his lifestyle: rent, 42 francs (fr.); school, 25 fr.; paints and canvases, 35 fr.; washing, 12 fr.; food, 125 fr.; oil for lamp, 4 fr.; concierge, 15 fr. [64]

In frequent correspondence--alternating often between French and English, even within the same letter--to his father, a graduate of the University of Paris, Ernest expressed his longing for the sunny weather and wide-open spaces of San Jose, inquiring about the town's changes, his father's new herd of colts, and requesting that the San Jose Mercury News be sent to him. He also reported on "the cold dreadful winters in Paris," his artistic progress, dreams of being exhibited at the Salon, and the high cost of living in Paris, which his father underwrote. De Saisset's younger brother, Pierre (Peter), joined him in 1893 to study violin at the Paris Conservatory. Their letters to their father described their lives in Parisian art and social circles of the 1980s. [65]

Successful and competitive at the Academie Julian, De Saisset was nonetheless frustrated by what appeared to him to be the Paris Salon's favoritism for native French students. [66] He returned to California in 1895, bringing with him numerous oils of French scenes. Here he continued painting. His subjects included nudes, rural scenes, and landscapes of Palo Alto and his family's three-thousand-acre ranch in Alameda County. He also did portraits of prominent local residents and family members, such as a beautiful, evocative oil of his mother having tea on the patio of their Victorian home at 478 Guadelupe Street (now South Market Street) in San Jose, a house his father had bought in 1861.

His life cut short by illness, on December 4, 1899, at age thirty-five, Ernest de Saisset died unexpectedly of rheumatism. He was buried in the Santa Clara Mission cemetery. His grave lies near the De Saisset Art Museum, founded in his memory by his younger sister, Isabelle, at the University of Santa Clara.

By the 1890s, photography had begun to supplant drawing and engraving as a form of illustration. Many artists who had documented early scenes of California history successfully turned to photography, including Victor Prevost, Alexandre Edouart, and Henri Penelon. In this period, other French artists drifted to California, among them Henry Farny, Maurice Del Mue, and Paul de Longpre who in Los Angeles came to be known as the "King of Flowers."

Paul De Longpre's father, Jean Antoine Marie Victor, was a dessinandier, a painter-artist, who contributed to the fame of Lyon as the world's chief center of textile designs. The author of forty books on fabric design and patterns specifically for the silk industry, he exhibited his work at the Lyon Art Salon of 1849.

De Longpre and his wife, Marie Therese Pinchaud, had several children who followed in their father's footsteps: Marie-Victor Raoul, born in 1843; Raoul Henri, born in 1859; and Paul, born in April 1855. Paul not only loved to draw, a skill that ran in the family, but also had an early sense of the commercial aspects of art: he sold his drawings to playmates when he was seven years old. By age twelve, he was able to earn a living painting flowers on folding fans for one of Lyon's silk manufacturers. [67]

On September 14, 1876, with his parents and brothers present, Paul married Josephine Estievenard. The couple moved to Paris. De Longpre's flower paintings were exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1877 and again in 1879. The young artist gained wide popularity in France at a time when original artwork was still highly prized for home decoration.

In 1889, however, the bank where de Longpre and his wife kept their savings failed. The couple was left with only a few hundred dollars that they had invested elsewhere. De Longpre boldly opted for a new start and sailed for New York in October of 1890 with Josephine and their daughters, Alice and Blanche. The first few years were difficult until, in another daring move, de Longpre set up a one-man exhibit of his work. The show was a success and de Longpre's work subsequently was exhibited not only in New York but also in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago.

While his career was picking up, the artist was dealt a new blow: he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Surgery left him weakened, and a mild climate was advised, so De Longpre moved to Los Angeles with his family, which included a third child, Pauline, born in 1898. He resumed painting flowers in watercolors and oils and again met with success. He loved Los Angeles and wrote a friend in 1900: "I have finally found the ideal place to live. The entire world should rendez-vous in Los Angeles, yet it is so little-known; there is enough land around the town to build five or six cities the size of Paris, with the mountains as a backdrop." [68]

Most of the land in Hollywood then was owned by Harvey and Daeida Wilcox. Daeida Wilcox was one of twenty thousand people who attended a popular exhibit of de Longpre's work in 1900. She dreamed of making Hollywood a cultural center and wanted the painter to become a resident of the budding community. Accordingly, as the story was told, she gave the de Longpres three large adjacent lots in exchange for three of his flower canvases. [69]

There, at the corner of Cahuenga and Prospect avenues (now Hollywood Boulevard), de Longpre built a mansion with twin towers flying American and French flags. The interior was filled with oriental rugs and ornately carved furniture. It was lit with scores of light bulbs, though electricity was still a novelty. De Longpre's paintings covered every inch of wall space or were set up on easels throughout the house. The grand hall was turned into a permanent exhibit of hundreds of his canvases. His brother Raoul joined him and painted there as well.

The "Roi des Fleurs," King of Flowers, as he became known, planted at his home a three-acre rose garden with more than four thousand rose bushes and a profusion of California flowers that he could paint in bloom throughout the year. His estate quickly became a tourist attraction. Postcards of it were printed and sold, streetcars from downtown Los Angeles stopped at the corner of his property, and a popular sightseeing company called the Balloon Route Excursion featured his house on its tours. Twenty-five thousand visitors came in a three-month period alone in 1905 to admire his flowers and, upon invitation, his paintings in the grand hall or in his studio. De Longpre's most famous visitor was President Theodore Roosevelt, who visited in 1903. The Washington White House today owns one of de Longpre's canvases, undoubtedly from that time. [70]

The dynamic French artist died at an early age, fifty-six, on June 29, 1911. His customary annual exhibit was held as a memorial in 1912. His wife and their two youngest daughters then returned to France. De Longpre's palatial home effectively died with its owner, while Hollywood grew and prospered around it. It was demolished in 1927. De Longpre Avenue and de Longpre Park evoke the memory of the "Roi des Fleurs," Hollywood's first living legend.

In the nineteenth century, in part because of the written reports and visual interpretations by these adventuresome French travelers, writers, and artists, California became solidly implanted in the European mythology as a legendary territory, later a new Eldorado, the Golden State. Throughout France, hills and neighborhoods took the name "Californie." The expression "Faire une Californie," in the days of the Gold Rush, meant finding great success. While historic French documents have long contributed to the ongoing attraction the French have for California, the presence of the French visitors and settlers discussed here greatly influenced and shaped California's culture from within. Their influence, beginning early in the state's history, flourished with French associations and families whose roots lie deep in California's past. The rich and unique saga of French artists in California uncovers the constant, underlying influence of the French, not only in the evolution of California art from its beginnings, but also in the discovery, settlement, and growth of the entire state.

Claudine Chalmers, born and raised in Cannes, France, was a freelance writer for Random House before completing her dissertation on the French in gold-rush San Francisco, at the University of Nice, 7991. She is now at work on several projects and exhibits concerning the French in California. Her art history book, Splendide Californie! Impressions of the Golden State by French Artists, 1786-1900 (The Book Club of California) is forthcoming.

(1.) Jean-Francois de Galaup de Laperouse, Voyage de La Perouse autour du monde, 4 vols., ed. L.A. Milet-Mureau (Paris: Imprimerie de la Republique, 1797), cited in Francoise Chenet, "L'artiste charge de mission," in L'Oeil aux Aguets, ou l'artiste en voyage, ed. Francois Moureau (Paris: Klincksiek, 1995), 138.

(2.) Madeleine Pinault-Sorensen, Duche' de Vancy, dessinateur de l'Expedition de La Perouse," (presentation given at the Colloque Laperouse, Albi, France, March 1985).

(3.) His name was spelled in a variety of ways by the count himself. The best source of information on this explorer and his voyage is the Association Laperouse, Albi, France. Following the association's usage, I have used "Laperouse," Recommended sources for the exploration are Catherine Gaziello, L'Expedition de Laperouse, Replique francaise aux voyages de Cook (Paris: Ecole des Chartes, 1984); John Dunmore et Maurice do Brossard, eds., Le voyage de Laperouse, 1785-1788 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1985); Francois Bellec, La genereuse et tragique expedition Laperouse (Rennes: Ouest France, 1985).

(4.) Laperouse, Voyage autour du monde, cited in Chenet, "L'artiste charge de mission," 138.

(5.) Frederick William Beechey, An Account of a Visit to California, ed. D.M. Coulter (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1941), 86-87.

(6.) Auguste Bernard Duhaut-Cilly, Voyage autour du monde, principalement a la Californie et aux lies Sandwich, pendant les annees 1826, 1827, 1828 et 1829 X Vols. (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1834-35), 2:48; 1:362-63. Auguste is the explorer's first name, while Bernard is actually a part of his last name, which he never used as such.

(7.) Jacques Perilhou, 'Auguste Duhaut-Cilly et ses freres, marins malouins, meconnus de la lere moitie du XIXeme siecle," Carcassonne, France, n.p. Also see Duhaut-Cilly, Duhaut-Cilly's 1826-1829 Voyage, August Fruge and Neal Harlow, eds. (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1998)

(8.) Author is indebted to historian Jacques Peril hou for information regarding Masselot, obtained from the Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes, France.

(9.) This group of 250 settlers from Mexico sailed to California in 1834 under the leadership of wealthy Mexican Jose Maria Hijar (thus the expedition's name) and Mexican army officer Jose Maria Padres; Charles E. Chapman, A History of California: The Spanish Period (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 464-66.

(10.) Most of the biographical information about Penelon is drawn from John Dewar, Adios, Mr. Penelon (Los Angeles: Museum of Natural History, 1968), and from the unpublished research of Helene Demeestere, Los Angeles.

(11.) See William Heath Davis, Seventy-Five Years in California (1889) for his account of Don Del Aliso in Los Angeles; Annick Foucrier, "Pierre Esliens Vignes: Diary of the Other Brother," The Californians, May-June 1993; Mary Grace Paquette, Then Came the French (Sonora, Calif.: Tuolumne County Historical Society, 1996).

(12.) Daily Arizona Miner, February 5, 1874.

(13.) For biographical information on the artist, see W.I. Scandlin, illustrated Lecture (Detroit, Mich.: Photographers Association of America, 1901); Bruce Duncan, "I, Victor Prevost," Graphic Antiquarian 4:1 (October 1976); and Letter from Marie Louise Prevost, 1946, Jeanne Van Nostrand files. I am also thankful for the assistance of Scott Shields, Curator of Art, The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, formerly Curator of Collections at the California Historical Society, San Francisco.

(14.) Claudine Chalmers, "L'aventure francaise a San Francisco pendant la Ruee vers l'Or," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nice, France, 1991.

(15.) The lure and lore of gold may well have run through Rupalley's family for decades. His grandfather had earlier mined gold in Siberia, but no one in the family had yet ventured as far as California. Interview with Marie de Rupalley, Paris, 1998.

(16.) Ship passenger lists, Archives Departementales, Rouen, France; Jules Rupalley scrapbook, Honeyman Collection, Bancroft Library

(17.) Claudine Chalmers, "Greenwood," in California Gold Rush Camps, Robert J. Chandler, ed. (San Francisco: Book Club of California Keepsake, 1998), n.p.

(18.) Rupalley, Scrapbook, n.p., Honeyman Collection, Bancroft Library.

(19.) Birth certificate, Saint-Malo Archives, France. See Albert Dressler, California's Pioneer Artist: Ernest Narjot (San Francisco: A. Dressler, 1936).

(20.) For an excellent overview of the French expeditions to Sonora, see Rufus K. Wyllys, The French in Sonora (1850-1854) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1932).

(21.) Dressler, California's Pioneer Artist, n.p.

(22.) See Katherine Church Holland, "The San Francisco Art Association, 1871-1906," California History 76 (Supplement 1997): 17-20.

(23.) Dressler, California's Pioneer Artist, n.p.

(24.) Edan Milton Hughes, Artists in California, 2786-1940 (San Francisco: Hughes Publishing Co., 1989), 327-28.

(25.) San Francisco Call, August 25, 1898.

(26.) Xavier Van de Casteele was a Belgian Argonaut of 1851 with ties to Ernest Narjot, who did Casteele's portrait and that of his wife. Chalmers, "L'Aventure Francaise a San Francisco," 754.

(27.) Birth Records, Paris Archives; Business Directory for Paris, 1846, 1848; Lee Sims and Barbara Bundschu research and collection, San Francisco. Jump's name and other data appeared in the 1852 California Census of Tuolumne County, indicating that he was twenty at the time, and his birthplace had been France, Jeanne Van Nostrand collection; Edan Milton Hughes, "The Last Jump," unpublished manuscript.

(28.) "Jump's Last," San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, October 16, 1865.

(29.) Alta California February 5, 1868.

(30.) Mark Twain 's Letters II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 3.

(31.) Saint Louis Post Dispatch, April 21, 1883; I am indebted to historian Guy de Rougemont for calling my attention to Jump's friendship with Twain and to Jump's wanderings in Canada.

(32.) Chicago Tribune, April 21, 1883.

(33.) Harry T. Peters, California on Stone (New York: Doubleday Doran, Garden City, 1935), 63.

(34.) Birth Records, Paris Archives; business directories, 1846 and 1848, Paris Archives; Tavernier fought at Buzenval; Gene Hailey, ed., California Art Research Monographs 4 (San Francisco: Works Progress Administration, 1937), p. 2.

(35.) See William Cullen Bryant, ed., Picturesque America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1872).

(36.) Deejay Mackart, "Monterey, the Bohemian Resort it Was Twenty Years Ago," San Francisco Morning Call, July 10, 1892.

(37.) Hailey, California Art Research Monographs 4:13.

(38.) San Francisco Chronicle, July 20, 1879; I am indebted to San Francisco historian Bill Kostura for his research on the buildings at 728 and 729 Montgomery Street, San Francisco.

(39.) For an excellent description, based on newspaper clippings, of this celebrated party, see Birgitta Hjalmarson, Artful Players, Artistic Life in Early San Francisco (Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 1999), 64-65

(40.) For Tavernier in Hawaii, see H.M. Lusquiens, "Jules Tavernier," Honolulu Academy of Arts Bulletin, December 1940; Betty Hoag-McGlynn, "Jules Tavernier, the Volcano Painter," Hawaii Island Artists (Hawaii: Malma Arts Inc., 1989); and Jerome A. Hart, "Tavernier, Artiste-Peintre," The Argonaut, March 2, 1907.

(41.) Tavernier had married Lizzie Fulton in San Francisco in February 1877, after a short courtship. "An Artist Wedded," San Francisco Daily Morning Call, February 26, 1877.

(42.) Mayo Hayes O'Donnell, "Tavernier's Doom," Peninsula Diary, May 10, 1957.

(43.) Hughes, Artists in California, 565.

(44.) Unpublished research by Nan and Roy Jones, Ross, California; J. Sam Moore, El Paso, Texas; and Nikki Silva and Edna E. Kimbo, Santa Cruz, California.

(45.) This biography is based on information found in the Musee des Beaux Arts J. Dechelette, Roanne, France; and in the Raphael Weill Papers, 1880-1932, Manuscript Collection, North Baker Research Library, California Historical Society.

(46.) A former wrestler and circus manager, Rodophe Julian studied painting before founding his acclaimed academy in 1868; see H. Barbara Winberg, The Lure of Paris, Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 1991), 221.

(47.) Ida L. Brooks, "The Romantic Life Story of a Studio Stove," San Francisco Sunday Call, April 16, 1911.

(48.) See Arthur I. Street, "California Artists - III," Overland Monthly, January 1899, no. 193; and San Francisco Call, October 30, 1910, cited in Hailey, California Art Research Monographs, 4:49.

(49.) Towncrier, San Francisco News Letter, March 19, 1892.

(50.) "The Mexican Pictures of Amadee [sic] Joullin," The Argonaut, January 9, 1899.

(51.) Hailey, California Art Research Monographs, 4:72.

(52.) Ibid.

(53.) Ibid.; "Amedee Joullin Memorial Exhibit," San Francisco Chronicle, March 25, 1917; Oakland Tribune, April 1, 1917.

(54.) Interview with Victor Reiter-Pages, 1998. Information for this biography was drawn from the Pages papers.

(55.) "Canvas Depicts Building Bustle," The San Francisco Call, Sunday, October 9, 1909.

(56.) For a discussion of his political activities in San Francisco, see Jehanne Bietry-Salinger, Le Guide franco-californien de Notre Centenaire (San Francisco: Pisani Printing & Publishing Co., March 1949), 253.

(57.) Haig Patigan, Exhibition of Early and Recent Paintings by Jules Pages, exhibition catalog, n.d., The Pent House Gallery, San Francisco, Calif.

(58.) The Golden Ingot lottery is discussed in William F. Shepard, "Parisian Paupers in the California Gold Rush," (paper presented at Conference of California Historical Societies, Monterey, California, 1955); Report from Patrice Dillon to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Consular Correspondence, September 14, 1853, Foreign Affairs Archives, Paris, France, shows that in 1853 Etienne Taniere received financial aid in San Francisco.

(59.) Hughes, "Roure, Emile A.," Artists in California, 481.

(60.) Much of the biographical information on Pauline Schoenmakers is derived from the Stephen H. Meyer's family archives and from the research he is conducting with the assistance of historians Judy Debella, Pacifica, and Annick Foucrier, Paris; also see "An Artist' Sudden Death," San Francisco Call, March 29, 1895; Hughes, Artists in California, 498, 551.

(61.) "Art Notes," San Francisco News Letter and California Advertising, May 13, 1876, cited in Hjalmarson, Artful Players. Many of the school's women artists later achieved fame on the California art scene, among them Alice B. Chittenden, Evelyn McCormick, and Eva Withrow.

(62.) In 1893, the California School of Design moved to the Mark Hopkins mansion on Nob Hill and became a part of the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art.

(63.) Marjorie Pierce, San Jose and Its Cathedral (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Western Tanager Press, 1990), 47; see also H.S. Foote, Pen Pictures from the Garden of the World (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1888), 662.

(64.) Carol Pace Harney, "The De Saisset Family Portrait," September 1995. San Jose Historical Museum Archives, San Jose, Calif.

(65.) Letters of Ernest de Saisset, de Saisset Papers, Santa Clara University Archives, Santa Clara, Calif. See particularly "Paris, August 15, 1887," and "Le Portel, June 22, 1890."

(66.) Ibid.

(67.) Much of the biographical information about de Longpre is derived from Blandine Seneque, "Differents aspects de la peinture lyonnaise dans la seconde moitie du XIXeme siecle a travers les Maucherat deLongpre," Master's thesis, University of Paris, 1999. Also of great help to me was the research of Jean-Jacques Vitrac, Valley Springs, Calif.; and Helene Demeestere, Los Angeles. DeLongpre never used "Maucherat," his third given name.

(68.) Cited in Helene Demeestere, "Il Etait Une Fois... Un Francais," Bulletin de l'Alliance Francaise, Los Angeles, 1998, 1-2.

(69.) "Children of France in the Southland," Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1901, cited in William Wurtz, "Paul deLongpre, Hollywood's Eccentric 'Flower Artist'," California Historical Courier, May 1983, 4-5.

(70.) Seneque, "Differents aspects de la peinture lyonnaise," 47.

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Author:	Chalmers, Claudine
Publication:	California History
Geographic Code:	1U9CA
Date:	Dec 22, 2000
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Topics:	Artists, French Criticism and interpretation French (European people) History United States French artists Criticism and interpretation French in the United States History