CHARLES CHRISTIAN NAHL,
ARTHUR NAHL, AND AUGUST WENDEROTH
PORTRAITURE, GENRE PAINTING, ILLUSTRATION, lithography, graphic design, and photography were among the various art services that the Nahls, Charles Christian, and his half-brother, Hugo Wilhelm Arthur, known as Arthur, and a family friend, Frederick August Wenderoth, offered to a Gold Rush clientele. Until they arrived in 1851, no artist in California possessed the high quality of European academic art training or the depth of professional and technical experience that these three men brought to an extensive range of artistic enterprises. The Nahls, from the city of Kassel, in Hesse, in what is now west central Germany, were descendants of a prominent German family of artists that extended in a continuous line back to the seventeenth century.
Leaving Kassel because of political turmoil, this Hessian party went first to Paris and then, because of unrest in France, to New York. Hearing of gold, they continued west to California. There, they purchased, naively, a salted claim in the vicinity of Rough and Ready, a notorious mining camp. Reverting to their metier, Charles briefly went into partnership with a sign painter and Arthur took a job with a woodcarver nearby. Before the end of the year Charles had established his family’s home in Sacramento and opened a studio with August Wenderoth. The activities of their first studio were discussed in an article in the Illustrated Placer Times and Transcript, dated 1 January 1852.
The number of orders they have recently received for paintings of various kinds has induced them to forgo their determination of removing to the Bay. An opportunity is now offered the citizens of Sacramento to gratify their taste for this exalted branch of the fine arts, in procuring pictures of such character as will constitute most pleasing momentos [sic] of early times in California. For admirable design and most finished execution, Mr. Nahl and Mr. Wenderoth are equally distinguished, and their works embracing a large scope of California incidents and scenery, are justly entitled to rank with the very best production of the day. In the department of portrait painting, these artists have attained a no less degree of excellence. Their likenesses are strikingly correct and possess that important recommendation as to price, which places a domestic luxury within the reach of the most moderate means. The miniatures taken by Messrs. Nahl and Wenderoth have been several times noticed and are universally admired and commended.1
FIG. 41. Frederick August Wenderoth, Portrait of a Man (unidentified), 1854. Miniature, watercolor on ivory, 4 × 3 in. Oakland Museum of California, gift of the estate of Edna B. Lake.
It has been speculated that the miniatures referred to in the article may actually have been photographs, but there is no evidence that Nahl or Wenderoth were themselves photographers. Frederick August Wenderoth’s small Portrait of a Man (fig. 41), for example, is an exquisitely detailed, delicate watercolor, painted on wafer-thin ivory, that was probably drawn from a daguerreotype image. Its presentation in a cased oval format further enhances its association with early photographic portraiture.
Few examples of collaborative works produced by Nahl and Wenderoth survive, but among them are two lithographs, both from 1852 and signed: “Painted and Drawn on Stone by Ch Nahl & A Wenderoth.” One is titled Miner’s Cabin, Result of the Day (Oakland Museum of California) and the other A Miner Prospecting. The subjects of both lithographs are significant for their portrayal of the lives of gold miners in vivid images that inform two later works, Saturday Night in the Mines, 1856 (fig. 42)2 by Charles Christian Nahl in collaboration with Arthur Nahl, and The Lone Prospector, 1853 (see fig. 61), by A. D. O. Browere.
Saturday Night in the Mines, and a companion work also painted in 1856, Crossing the Plains (Stanford University Museum of Art), that measures approximately ten by sixteen feet, are the two largest of the Nahl canvases extant. Crossing the Plains depicts an immigrant party during a pause on their exhausting journey in an ox-drawn covered wagon. The two scenes were painted in oil on yards of seamed canvas using broad brushstrokes and techniques and equipment modified to accommodate special problems in drawing and proportion that occur when working on such a large scale. A large shed was built behind Nahl’s house in San Francisco for work on paintings of this size. Huge paintings of this type were popular at the time as mural decorations for hotels, saloons, and public halls. These two paintings were first displayed in a saloon in Sacramento, and then exhibited at the California State Fair in Marysville in 1858, before going on extended view at the state capitol.3 Both the lithograph, Miner’s Cabin, and the painting, Saturday Night in the Mines, depict the nighttime interior of a small cabin, probably much like the Nahls’ cabin at Rough and Ready. Illuminated by firelight, the six miners, some of whom seem to be typical members of a recurring cast of characters in lithographs and paintings by Nahl, are engaged in various activities.
FIG. 42. Charles Christian Nahl and Hugo Wilhelm Arthur Nahl, Saturday Night at the Mines, 1856. Oil on canvas, 136 × 208 in. Stanford University Museum of Art, Stanford, Calif., gift of Jane Lathrop Stanford. 12083
The largest of the three surviving examples with the joint signatures of Charles Nahl and August Wenderoth is the painting Miners in the Sierra (fig. 43), which was probably painted in their studio in Sacramento between the fall of 1851 and the fire of 2 November 1852 that destroyed much of the city. Another painting of the same size, pendant to that work but now lost, depicted Native Americans. Both paintings had been in the collection of the Fred Heilbron family, which has been prominent in Sacramento since the Gold Rush. Miners in the Sierra may be the first important painting of a mining scene based on the artists’ own experiences at Rough and Ready, although the figures in the picture are not known to represent any particular members of the Nahl party. This work has the further distinction of being the only large-scale painting associated with Nahl that is predominantly a landscape.
FIG. 43. Charles Christian Nahl and Frederick August Wenderoth, Miners in the Sierra, 1851. Oil on canvas, 54¼ × 67 in. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., gift of the Fred Heilbron Collection.
It is not known how the artists divided the labors in their collaborative efforts. It would be tempting to assume that Wenderoth was responsible for the landscape because Nahl, in his genre paintings, usually relegates landscape to secondary importance. However, as both Nahl and Wenderoth shared a common German academic training that emphasized figural compositions and because there are no known landscapes by Wenderoth, there is little evidence to support that argument.
Although the artists have presented what at first appears to be a landscape with figures, it is actually a genre subject. Miners in the Sierra presents an imposing mountain landscape that is as important as the depiction of the miners in a scene that may best be viewed as a Gold Rush narrative. The central placement of the mountain stream has both compositional and thematic significance. All the pictorial components are arranged along diagonal lines that converge in the center of the painting where the stream first appears above the cascade. This establishes the crucial subjective importance of the water flow in the process of sluicing for gold—as well as a stabilizing anchor for the dynamic composition. The rocky topography of the rugged landscape is somewhat softened by verdant vegetation accentuated by a few wildflowers. The distant cabin contributes a domesticating effect to the scene. With the comforting warmth of chimney smoke, the miners’ wash drying on a clothesline and over nearby bushes, and the pathway of steps descending to the stream, the artists have imparted a note of optimism to the impression of harsh reality derived from their own prospecting experiences.
This picture points up the fact that by the time these artists arrived in California, gold mining typically was no longer a matter of the lone prospector panning by a stream; out of necessity finding gold became a somewhat mechanized group effort. The principal activity depicted in the painting involves four miners hard at work along either side of the long tom (a structural apparatus used to wash the gold from rocks and sand). The observer’s eye is immediately drawn to the red-, white-, and blue-shirted miners whose vigorous labors with pick and shovel are well executed in the confident figural style that distinguishes Nahl’s best works. One of the miners has stopped work long enough to quench his thirst with water from a bucket. This has the effect of interrupting the implicit flow of time suggested by the action of the other workers and to inject a momentary pause for the observer’s contemplation. This early mining scene subtly establishes, for the first time, a moralistic theme that reappears in many of Nahl’s Gold Rush paintings and illustrations. It represents one of the popular American myths of the Gold Rush: that God’s bounty in nature will reward the efforts of hard work shared among honest men, a sentiment offered to mitigate the self-serving motivation and lawless pursuits of many other Gold Rush participants.
After August Wenderoth married Nahl’s half-sister Laura in 1856, the couple moved to Philadelphia. This vacancy in the studio prompted Charles to add Arthur to the family business that had been relocated to San Francisco in 1852 following the devastating fire in Sacramento. That same year Arthur Nahl produced a small watercolor en grisaille titled The Fire in Sacramento, 1852 (fig. 44). His little souvenir of the conflagration, rendered in a dramatically contrasting range of black and gray tones on white paper, may have been intended for reproduction in a publication. Nahl describes the historical fire in vivid detail. His tableau is populated with dozens of tiny figures shown beneath clouds of thick black smoke rising from the flaming buildings. In a frantic effort to stop the fire, a group of firefighters advances to the right side of the scene while crowds of people and horse-drawn wagons are rapidly moving toward the left in reckless retreat from the burning city.
FIG. 44. Hugo Wilhelm Arthur Nahl, The Fire in Sacramento, 1852. Watercolor on paper, 4½ × 7⅛ in. Oakland Museum of California, gift of Concours d’Antiques, Art Guild.
Although a number of works survive that bear the signature of Arthur Nahl alone, more numerous were his collaborations with Charles. It seems that most of the Nahl brothers’ early collaborative efforts were in portraiture. However, according to a letter from Arthur to his uncle Wilhelm in Germany telling him in 1854 of commissions to paint four panoramas, we conclude that he may also have been a competent landscape painter.
One such collaboration was on a scene titled The Camp of a U.S. Coast Geodetic Survey Party (fig. 45), painted in 1858. As part of a geodetic survey of the Pacific Coast, made in 1853 by the United States Department of Commerce, several artists had received commissions to produce images of topographical features for reproduction in government publications. Captain W. E. Greenwell, the man in charge of the survey between San Francisco and San Diego, also commissioned a series of six oil paintings from various artists, including the Nahls and the landscape painter Frederick A. Butman (see fig. 76), depicting the surveyors’ camps in various locations.4 The Nahl brothers’ version, dated 1858, is particularly interesting as a rare example of their treatment of landscape. The camp, in an unspecified location, appears to be set up on an elevated plateau above the view of rolling hills seen below the horizon. The composition, in which most of the pictorial elements are parallel to the framing edges, is a less intricate composition than those used in most of the Nahls’ genre subjects. The near-silhouette shapes of large oak trees, set against a luminous sky painted in gradations of warm yellow light on the left that shifts to clear azure blue on the right, provide the initial visual interest and effectively set a stage for the narrative. Verdant hillsides of spring are just beginning to take on the tawny golden tones of summer in California. The painting’s immediate appeal as a landscape notwithstanding, the little vignettes of figures and animals set among the tents of the surveyors’ campsite transform the work into a genre subject. This is consistent with the Nahls’ preference for narrative content in all of their painting, except some portraits.
FIG. 45. Charles Christian Nahl and Hugo Wilhelm Arthur Nahl, The Camp of a U.S. Coast Geodetic Survey Party, 1858. Oil on panel, 12½ × 18⅛ in. Collection of Santa Barbara Historical Society, Calif., gift of Mrs. Arthur Greenwell.
The Nahl brothers’ observation of a day in the life of a surveyors’ camp invites closer inspection of a number of pictorial details. The scene represents a temporary garrison during the apparent absence of the surveyors, who may be working in the field. Initial attention is drawn to the row of six white canvas tents located just below the center of the picture—their faceted shapes defined by strong sunlight and shadow. Closer inspection reveals such nearby details as a small flock of poultry, laundry drying on a clothesline, and a makeshift horse barn constructed of stacked hay bales. The large tent at the far right, with a projecting stovepipe, is probably the cook-tent and surveyors’ mess. The American flag, flying from a tall flagpole at the far right edge of the painting, identifies the official, governmental nature of the depicted site and provides the picture’s single note of bright color contrast. The observer’s eye goes to the action at the lower center of the picture where the arrival of a man in wagon drawn by galloping white horses is announced by two, presumably barking, dogs at the front and rear. Nahl’s reluctance to describe any scene devoid of incident is consistent with his stylistic inclination toward genre painting.
The most dramatic of the Nahl brothers’ collaborative paintings is Fire in San Francisco Bay (fig. 46), a work that recreates an event in San Francisco’s early history and gives Charles Christian Nahl, as the dominant artist, the opportunity to exercise his passion for history painting in a contemporary tableau. Nahl has depicted a battle scene in a style freely adapted from the famous military combats painted by his mentor, the renowned French painter and lithographer Horace Vernet. Charles had long admired the grandiose documentary battle scenes for which Vernet was so popular. As part of his own painting style, Nahl emulated Vernet’s extensive use of anecdotal detail and the rendering of his subjects in a clear, descriptive light without obscuring selected passages in deep shadow. It is not known to what extent Arthur contributed to the finished work.
The depicted incident occurred on 24 May 1853, when two abandoned vessels converted to use as storage ships, the Canonicus and the Manco, caught fire in San Francisco harbor near the end of the Sacramento Street wharf. The primary factual sources of imagery in the painting were derived from a sketch drawn on top of a box by a grocer’s delivery boy who had witnessed the conflagration.5
FIG. 46. Charles Christian Nahl and Hugo Wilhelm Arthur Nahl, Fire in San Francisco Bay, 1856. Oil on canvas, 26 × 40 in. Private collection.
The Nahl brothers’ ambitious panoramic view of San Francisco that encompasses the eastern edge of the city, its harbor, and the burning ships side-by-side, was not completed until 1856. The scene is heavily populated with animated figures crowding the dockside and seen in rowboats pulling fire hoses through the water to firemen aboard the ships. Powder kegs on the Manco were prevented from exploding during a frenzied struggle to extinguish the flames. If the fire itself is not the real protagonist of the drama, it must then be the tiny figure of the fire chief who is standing between burning masts on the Manco directing the efforts of the waterfront fire brigade.
The dynamic composition is balanced asymmetrically with emphasis placed on the smoke and flames and their reflection in the water at the left-center foreground. This asymmetry belies the artists’ use of a simple one-point perspective in which all the pictorial features are arranged along diagonal lines that radiate from a single vanishing point on the horizon—near the center of the painting. To enhance visual interest for the vast expanse of sky in the picture, Nahl divides the color between the left and right sides in gradations from blue to yellow as he did in his painting, The Camp of a U.S. Geodetic Survey Party. The imposing building shown in the distance is the United States Marine Hospital, then under construction.
From today’s point of view, the painting could be seen as a work of pictorial journalism, but Fire in San Francisco Bay transcends mere illustration and becomes an example of a peculiarly American form of genre painting. In its straightforward, documentary style, this work does not express the political viewpoints or moralistic commentaries that characterize much European history painting. It makes its appeal to a new kind of art patronage on the American frontier, one with a taste for romantic realism.
From the mid-1850s through the late 1860s, Charles Christian Nahl turned again to the same idea of history and genre painting. Among these are a few small works on subjects that drew upon personal experiences that occurred during his family’s arduous journey across Panama en route from New York to California. The Atlantic port of Chagres on the Isthmus was a picturesque tropical village that was also widely reputed to be a particularly dangerous and unhealthy environment for travelers. The romance of danger, the exotic flora and fauna of the tropics, and his contacts with the native culture made profound impressions on Nahl that were later incorporated into paintings done in his San Francisco studio.
Working from a series of detailed sketches that he made on the journey through the tropics, Nahl produced at least four paintings and several illustrations that deal with incidents that occurred on the trip across Panama. In letters to his family in Germany in 1852,6 Charles discussed in detail the experiences of crossing the Isthmus that he later turned into subject matter for paintings such as Chagres River Scene (Crossing the Chagres) (fig. 47). The painting’s focus of interest is a flat-bottomed bongo boat, crowded with passengers, as it is poled up the tranquil river. The sight of an overturned boat, snagged on treacherous rocks and floating debris, is the only reference to danger in an otherwise picturesque tropical landscape. Apparently, this small sketch is Nahl’s preliminary study for a larger work titled Incident on the Chagres River (The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley). The essential features of the landscape and boat remain the same, but the subject becomes significantly more dramatic with the depiction of a native falling overboard into a reputedly alligator-infested river.
FIG. 47. Charles Christian Nahl, Chagres River Scene (Crossing the Chagres), n.d. Oil on canvas mounted on board, 6¾ × 8⅞ in. Collection of Dr. Oscar and Trudy Lemer.
Although Charles professed to be no landscape painter,7 these small tropical scenes reveal his skill in rendering the essential features of a landscape to dramatic effect. Nahl’s Boaters Rowing to Shore at Chagres, 1855 (fig. 48), is a very small painting that presents a predominantly landscape subject on a grand scale. It would, however, be uncharacteristic for Nahl to indulge in landscape for its own sake. He exercises his penchant for narrative historical content in a scene that uses topographical and architectural details to set a panoramic stage for a dramatic event.
FIG. 48. Charles Christian Nahl, Boaters Rowing to Shore at Chagres, 1855. Oil on tin, 9¼ × 12 in. Collection of Dr. Oscar and Trudy Lemer.
Nahl takes an elevated viewpoint overlooking the scene in which the principal pictorial features, boats and waves, are arranged along opposing diagonal lines at the center foreground. The village of Chagres can be seen in the bright, hazy distance by the water’s edge along the base of the hills at the right side of the painting. The ruins of an old Spanish fortress on top of a three-hundred-foot-high cliff, at the left of center, command a sweeping view of the river and the seaport of Chagres. Against this background, Nahl positions the small boatloads of disembarking steamship passengers who are being rowed, at their peril, through turbulent waves and among half-submerged timbers floating in the swells of the river—rendered in a translucent lime green.
Charles Nahl’s exuberant color schemes were the subject of some harsh criticism during his own time. His frequent use of a dominant triad of high-key secondary hues (green, violet, and orange), or more often, the analogous tertiary hues (such as yellow green, blue green, red violet, red orange), contribute to the somewhat artificial look typical of Nahl’s distinctive, bright color palette.
Notwithstanding a growing interest in paintings of historical subjects during the late 1850s, the mainstays of patronage for the busy Nahl studio in San Francisco continued to be portraiture and illustration. With the possible exception of the highly regarded William Smith Jewett, no other painter in California enjoyed as large a patronage for portraits than Charles Christian Nahl. It has been suggested that the numerous commissions for portraits painted by Charles Nahl often required the assistance of his brother Arthur so that they could keep up with the demand. In 1858, Arthur wrote a letter to Wilhelm Nahl in Germany in which he described his role as a studio assistant to Charles: “We are working like a factory; Carl [Charles] paints the heads and I paint the garments.”8 This mass-production technique is blamed for stylistic inconsistencies and a certain lack of vitality found in some run-of the-mill portraits that bear the signature of C. Nahl. Many portraits were based on daguerreotypes, rather than on the more time-consuming multiple sittings by the subject, which would also account for the sheer volume of portraits emanating from the Nahl studio. Even so, when challenged or inspired by his subject, no other portrait painter in California surpassed the impeccable draftsmanship, precision of detail, or rendering of an extensive range of rich textures and lustrous surfaces that are evident in Nahl’s best portraits. Of the more than fifty portraits of men, women, children, and families that have been documented as coming from the Nahl studio, many still exist and there may be many others yet to be located.
FIG. 49. Charles Christian Nahl, Little Miss San Francisco, 1853. Oil on canvas, 38 × 30 in. Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, Calif., purchased with funds from Mrs. T. Warren Kyddson in memory of her husband, Dr. T. Warren Kyddson; Mr. and Mrs. Vern C. Jones; Crocker Art Museum Association Memorial Funds; and others.
One subject where Charles excelled was in his portraits of children. An early and especially fine example is Little Miss San Francisco, 1853 (fig. 49). This utterly charming formal portrait of an otherwise unidentified little girl is a traditional studio set piece. She is carefully posed sitting on a chair inlaid with mother-of-pearl (which Nahl painted in reduced scale to suit the subject) that sits on a floral carpet in front of the requisite swag of fringed and tasseled drapery. The artist has captured the essential qualities of youthful innocence and vitality—a daunting challenge to most portrait painters—that conveys a convincing truth of the likeness. The child wears a crisp white dress lavishly trimmed with delicate lace. In her right hand she grasps a small bunch of green grapes and in the other she holds the white moiré satin ribbon attached to a fancy, pale yellow hat. Nahl took obvious pleasure in rendering the particular details and textures of embroidery and ostrich feathers on the elaborately decorated hat. The continuity of technique and the consistently high quality of detail in this painting leave little doubt of its attribution to the hand of Charles Nahl alone.
FIG. 50. Charles Christian Nahl, Portrait of Jane Eliza Steen Johnson, 1858. Oil on canvas, 34¼ × 26½ in. Oakland Museum of California, gift of Dr. Gerald H. Gray.
FIG. 51. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Madame Moitessier, 1851. Oil on canvas, 69½ × 51¾ in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Samuel H. Kress collection. Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Of exceptional quality is Charles Nahl’s Portrait of Jane Eliza Steen Johnson (fig. 50). The elegant three-quarter-length formal portrait of a San Francisco lady painted in 1858 is reminiscent, in style and fashion, of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s portrait, Madame Moitessier (fig. 51), painted in 1851. Although it seems unlikely that Nahl could have known about the Ingres after coming to America in 1849, the painting is representative of a formula for society portraits in the classical style that was popular in France when Nahl studied in Paris. Common to both portraits are the sitter’s characteristic direct gaze at the observer, the impeccably smoothed hairline framing the face, the bared shoulders, the black velvet and lace gown, and the comparable fashion accessories that are the embodiment of material grace and wealth requisite to the mode. Nahl’s academic training is apparent in the exquisite draftsmanship and high degree of finish that give a full measure of attention to every high-fashion detail.
Jane Eliza Steen Johnson and her husband arrived in San Francisco from Ireland during the Gold Rush. They opened a dry-goods and millinery store called the Lace House on Sacramento Street near Portsmouth Square. There the attractive, high-spirited Jane Eliza modeled clothing and other finery for the miners to buy as gifts for their wives or girlfriends.9 This splendid, formal portrait depicts Jane Eliza luxuriously dressed in a black velvet Parisian ball gown corseted and elaborately trimmed with fine black lace, and wearing a blue satin ribbon in her hair. She holds a folded cockade fan with ostrich feathers and ivory handle, and has adorned herself with jeweled gold rings, bracelets, earrings, a pendant cross, and a brooch set with a daguerreotype portrait of her son. Overall, Nahl’s opulent portrait, notwithstanding the remarkable likeness confirmed by an earlier daguerreotype, also to some extent constitutes an advertisement for The Lace House emporium.
Charles Christian Nahl’s talent for drawing and painting the human figure with anatomical accuracy and realistic animation is evident in his prodigious output of genre subjects for illustrations as well as paintings. Another manifestation of his interest in human anatomy was his regular regime of physical culture, undertaken with his brother, Arthur, and like-minded friends. They founded the first athletic club in America, and even wrote a book on the subject.
During the 1860s the Nahl brothers remained active, individually and collaboratively, producing graphic designs and illustrations. Decoratively illustrated certificates and diplomas were commissioned for members of various civic and fraternal organizations. Charles also designed special commemorative pictorials suitable for framing, such as his memorial to Abraham Lincoln, that were lithographed for distribution to subscribers, and he worked as an illustrator of anecdotal historical incidents that frequently drew upon Gold Rush lore and were published to accompany poetry, short stories, and books by various authors. It was the Nahl brothers’ prolific illustrations of life in the mines, appearing in many widely distributed publications from the early days of the Gold Rush, that were responsible for giving the world its most enduring images of the Forty-niner.
The millionaire merchant, railroad, and banking tycoons who prospered from the Gold Rush and Silver Bonanza became California’s aristocracy. As the wealthy members of the San Francisco and Sacramento elite indulged their fondness for foreign travel, with the de rigueur Continental Grand Tour, they soon acquired a taste for collecting European art to complement their cultural aspirations. This shift in preference caused much harm to the local art market. As more and more Italian, French, and German painting and sculpture was brought from Europe, many fine California artists complained of a severe drop in their commissions and sales.
Charles Nahl was one of only a few local painters who achieved a comfortable measure of success in the 1860s and 1870s with commissions for paintings in the European style. Subjects drawn from history, literature, and classical mythology graced the lavishly furnished mansions of prominent families, among them the Stanfords, Floods, Bests, and Crockers. Charles Nahl’s most devoted patron was Judge Edwin Bryant Crocker of Sacramento, who was also a collector of European paintings and fine old-master drawings. Under Judge Crocker’s patronage, Nahl received the opportunity to indulge his longtime interest in painting the romantic and neoclassical subjects that he had studied in European prototypes during his formative years. Among his forays into the romantic style are three equestrian works inspired by Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, Joaquin Murietta, 1868 (private collection), Nahl’s sensational depiction of the legendary California bandit; The Love Chase, 1869, a somewhat sentimental Arabian fantasy; and its pendant work (both are in the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California), The Patriotic Race, 1870, with related imagery adapted to an American Revolutionary theme.
Nahl followed these works with a trilogy of paintings for Crocker based on the legend of the Romans and the Sabine women. This series provided the artist with the freedom to demonstrate his competence as an academic classicist in a style influenced by the great French masters Nicolas Poussin and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The commission enabled Nahl to display his highly disciplined technique in representing such pictorial details as complex figure groupings in action poses—without benefit of live models—voluptuous translucent flesh tones, and the skillful handling of drapery folds and textures. But Nahl’s distinctive, high-keyed color palette and polished surfaces, although still much admired, were already somewhat out of style at the time.10
In 1873, Charles Nahl followed his masterpiece, Sunday Morning in the Mines (see fig. 81), with a companion piece, Fandango (fig. 52), also commissioned by Crocker, that illustrates life in the days of the Spanish rancho period in California. Although Fandango has an equally theatrical subject with multiple figures, including dancers and equestrian riders, the depicted celebration is without obvious moral implications.
FIG. 52. Charles Christian Nahl, Fandango, 1873. Oil on canvas, 72 × 108 in. Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, Calif., E. B. Crocker Collection.
Charles Nahl and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Arthur Nahl enjoyed their well-respected reputations and popularity until the ends of their lives. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, as artistic styles were changing, public interest in the Nahl brothers’ paintings, and other manifestations of Victorian taste, declined. It is for their Gold Rush paintings and drawings in particular that they should be long remembered.
FIG. 53. Ernest Narjot, Placer Operations at Foster’s Bar, 1851. Oil on panel, 12 × 14 in. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
