ERNEST NARJOT AND GEORGE HENRY BURGESS
THE PROFESSIONAL LIFE OF ERNEST NARJOT, a pioneer California artist, spanned nearly a half century beginning with his arrival in San Francisco during the early years of the Gold Rush. Ernest Etienne Narjot de Francheville was born on Christmas Day, 1826, to a French family of artists in Brittany. He had received his early art training from his parents and continued his studies at an art school in Paris before the age of sixteen. An adventurous young man, Narjot yielded to the temptation of riches in faraway California. He set sail from France and endured the rigors of the voyage around Cape Horn, arriving in San Francisco sometime between 1849 and 1851 to join the throng of prospectors headed for the goldfields.1
Although Narjot had little success as a miner, he drew upon his art training to turn his observations and experiences from the diggings into subjects for paintings. Among his earliest paintings that deal with a mining theme is Placer Operations at Foster’s Bar, 1851 (fig. 53). Narjot’s apparent fascination with the technical aspects of placer mining gives this painting its documentary character. The wealth of descriptive details of the entire operation indicates that the artist’s observations were sketched on site. Borthwick described Foster’s Bar as “a place about half a mile long, with the appearance of having slipped down off the face of the mountains, and thus formed a flat along the side of the [Yuba] river.”2
Because placer mining had become a group activity in the interest of efficiency, various mechanical devices were increasingly used for greater control over the watercourses. Narjot’s painting depicts a mining camp occupied by eight or ten men beside a mountain stream where a dam is under construction, trenches being dug, and waterwheels used to collect and divert the flow of water for the recovery of gold. Narjot’s wooded landscape surrounding the operation, disturbed by the presence of tents, felled trees, a dam, excavations, and elaborate wooden structures, shows the miners’ immediate and harsh impact on the environment. The figure dressed in a red jacket and shown leaning on a large rock in the center foreground of the painting represents a Native American’s poignant observation of this apparent exploitation of nature. Narjot’s composition for this painting, depicting the man-made angular forms in a criss-cross linear arrangement that overlays the natural contours of the landscape, further underscores the miners’ destructiveness.
Failing to find success in California either as a miner or as an artist, Narjot moved to Mexico, where for several years he worked the mines and painted. In the late 1860s he was back in California and established in a studio on Clay Street in San Francisco, where he accepted commissions for portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes, as well as frescoes for murals in churches and public buildings.
Influenced by the French school of his early academic training, Narjot’s mature paintings revealed their stylistic sources in his choice of traditional subject matter rendered in somewhat idealized, romantic terms (see figs. 84, 85, and 86). He was attracted to imaginative subjects drawn from literature—such as his portrayal of the sacrifice of a Druid priestess. More popular were Narjot’s picturesque genre scenes of ethnic subjects that were not based upon reality but on romanticized concepts of frontier life among the Indians, the Mexicans, or the urban Chinese in San Francisco. These he continued painting throughout the 1880s and he enjoyed the recognition of his profession with awards for exhibited paintings and commissions for new public works.
A contemporary of Narjot whose artistic life in California spanned a comparable period is George Henry Burgess. Many of Burgess’s paintings are steeped in the colorful daily life of the Gold Rush years. From his initial attempts in the 1850s to strike it rich as a prospector to as late as the 1890s, when he was a well-established artist in San Francisco, he seemed preoccupied with the images and events surrounding the discovery of gold in California. He was one of four sons of a prominent physician in London. The eldest brother, Edward, was the first to reach California in 1847 as a member of Colonel Jonathan D. Stevenson’s California Regiment sent to occupy San Francisco harbor during the Mexican War. Edward remained in San Francisco, where he maintained a lucrative trading business between California and the Hawaiian Islands. Hubert, a multifaceted Argonaut—artist, jeweler, teacher, hunter, and inventor—set out by ship for California in 1850 after the news of the great discovery reached him in New York. Charles and George, crossing the plains sometime in 1850, joined the other Burgess brothers in their quest for California gold.
Soon, however, George, Hubert, and Charles turned from pick and pan to open their own small jewelry shop. Working out of a tent in Sonora, the brothers impressed their fellow miners by repairing watches and fashioning rings and chains out of the precious metal brought in from local diggings.
Sometime in 1850, jealous Americans levied a tax on foreign miners and proceeded to drive the Mexicans, Chilenos, and Frenchmen out of the Sonora area. According to Hubert, enraged Americans and Mexicans clashed and the resulting violence effectively destroyed many small business enterprises. Fearful of being robbed of their rings and watches, the brothers decided to leave Sonora and go their own way.3
Many Forty-niners who had limited success as prospectors were forced to seek alternative means of support. Hubert Burgess supplemented his income as a professional hunter, providing meat for miners’ tables in boardinghouses and restaurants in Gold Rush towns and cities. Hubert had instilled in his brother George an appreciation for the outdoor life—especially an enthusiasm for hunting small game. Their travels together on foot or on horseback while hunting in the gold country yielded many small sketches and paintings that artfully document a life away from the diggings. For Hunters in the Gold Country (fig. 54), George Burgess painted what appears to be an autobiographical depiction, himself and Hubert on one of their hunting expeditions. This small oil on canvas reveals the artist’s pleasure in a scene that conveys both the grandeur of the mountain landscape and a personal expression of intimacy with nature. The anecdotal subject, the two hunters on a forest trail, places it within the genre category. This “cabinet-size” painting, a nineteenth-century term used to describe small easel pictures on canvas executed in the artist’s studio, was probably developed from a field sketch on paper.
FIG. 54. George Henry Burgess, Hunters in the Gold Country, n.d. Oil on canvas, 8¼ × 11⅞ in. Collection of Dr. Oscar and Trudy Lemer.
In another work related to his hunting experiences, George Burgess has carefully composed a mountain landscape vignette within a vertical oval format. The small, untitled, undated watercolor of a man crossing a stream (fig. 55) depicts the hunter on horseback shouldering a rifle as he pauses in midstream to allow his mount to drink. A certain emphasis on the figure aside, it is in the delicate rendering of foliage and topography in a rhythmic arrangement of soft, curvilinear contours, with gleaming reflections on the gently flowing stream, that this tranquil scene makes its decorative appeal to Victorian taste. Hubert Burgess expresses an appreciation of the beauty of such a California landscape while lamenting gold mining’s damage to the environment:
The country is rapidly changing here in appearance. California is remarkable for the splendors of its autumnal colors. The foliage is now to be seen in all the possible shades of green and brown. The surface of the rocks likewise changes color, the mosses alike clinging to them, altering their shades. George and I, in going down the M[okelumne] River, were several times stopped by the grandeur of the scenery. The only drawback to the view is the color of the water. So much work being done up the rivers, its color is brown instead of as I have seen it, clear as crystal. The salmon still pass up but to certain death. . . .4
George’s idealized depictions of a pristine California landscape avoid any indications of environmental pollution that would certainly compromise the painting’s artistic merit for a nineteenth-century art collector.
FIG. 55. George Henry Burgess, Untitled (man crossing a stream), n.d. Watercolor on paper, 6 × 4½ in. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
FIG. 56. George Henry Burgess, Miners Working Beside a Stream, n.d. Watercolor on paper, 6⅞ × 5 in. Collection of Dr. Oscar and Trudy Lemer.
In his drawings and watercolors, particularly those where the landscape is a dominant feature, George Burgess employs a delicate, lyrical approach to the artful composition with a careful attention to chiaroscuro that reflects his academic training. Miners Working Beside a Stream, n.d. (fig. 56), a monochromatic watercolor highlighted with white, is an example of the artist’s ability to develop his subject almost entirely by massing areas of contrasting values, without resorting to the use of outline or color. The painting virtually succeeds as pure landscape, its deftly rendered patches of sunlight and shadow describing a waterfall in a woodland interior with an aesthetic appeal that almost makes the group of miners in the foreground seem merely incidental.
FIG. 57. George Henry Burgess, Artist’s Gold Mining Camp, 1854. Watercolor on board, 4⅞ × 7¾ in. Collection of Dr. Oscar and Trudy Lemer.
Burgess leaves a remembrance of his prospecting days in a watercolor, Artist’s Gold Mining Camp, 1854 (fig. 57). In this affectionate view of his campsite, he depicts a small tent pitched beneath the dense foliage of a low-branching tree on a hillside. A small dog waits outside the tent where a man is seen sitting in the dark interior while another is shown carrying a bucket as he walks toward a nearby stream—on the other side of which a figure waves from the doorway of another tent. The back of the picture bears a partly illegible inscription in the hand of the artist:
Tent where Charles [a brother] and I camped in 1854, back of Butte City Mountain, rich dry . . . had been found near by—We sunk a shaft through hard cement but although near the fortunate ones—found nothing. I picked up some pieces of gold while drinking of a spring near our camp. Charles went back to Butte City, I remained in the tent for a few days.
In his views of towns and mining scenes, Burgess relies upon observed factual data for their illustrative value, and pays less attention to the romantic idiom. This firsthand familiarity with the sites and activities of the mining regions informs Burgess’s drawings and watercolors with their authenticity of detail. Being in the goldfields, George was able to describe the fascinating mechanics of recovering gold and to develop a fresh approach to the pictorial opportunities afforded the sensitive artist. His straightforward visual descriptions were sketched on the spot, usually in pencil or pen and ink on paper, sometimes with the addition of watercolor—media that artists favor for efficiency and convenience.
By 1850, as greater numbers of miners were staking claims on the land, it was necessary to dig further up in the hills away from convenient sources of the water needed to wash out the gold. Burgess’s watercolor titled Mining at Tunnel Hill, Jackson, Amador County, California, 1853 (fig. 58), illustrates a team of miners at work using a trestle structure to transport ore cars, loaded with rocks dug from a tunnel on the hillside, that are sent down to be dumped into the valley below for further processing. The picturesque landscape setting does little to mitigate the clearly apparent harsh reality of hard labor expressed by the hot sun beating down on gritty rock piles and the bent back of the miner who is pushing an ore car along the trestle. This is a work that might have appealed to miners rather than to art collectors of the period.
George Burgess’s extensive travels throughout the gold country yielded wide-ranging opportunities for varied subject matter for paintings. His small watercolor, Mother Lode Inn, n.d. (fig. 59), is a genre painting that makes some fascinating observations touching upon the larger implication of the effect of the Gold Rush on California’s future. Burgess has offered a glimpse into the encroachment of the Gold Rush upon land that is neither town nor mining camp. This wayside inn for travelers is depicted at the junction of two well-established trails at an unspecified location. The major compositional elements are arranged parallel to the roadways that converge at the center of the painting in the middle distance. On either side of the big tree that anchors this composition at the center are several permanent structures including the eponymous lodging. Activities such as the big log being hauled in by oxcart, the hay wagon, the rail fence enclosure, and the presence of a few attendant personnel at the inn, all illustrate the invasion of the natural landscape. It is, however, the juxtaposition of this scene with the family of dark-skinned Native Americans and their black dog, shown almost in silhouette in the center foreground, that expresses the most poignant implication of this settlement. The apparent symbolic confrontation between the black dog and the resident white dog reveals the subtext for this otherwise innocent genre scene.
In 1853, at the urgings of Edward, whose trading business with the islands afforded George and his brothers an escape from their rugged living conditions in California, they went to live among the natives in Hawaii’s balmy climate. Charles worked as a paperhanger, Hubert prospered in the jewelry business, receiving commissions from the Hawaiian monarch King Kamehameha. Meanwhile, George painted a number of watercolors and made drawings on stone in preparation for lithographed views of Hawaii. Port of Honolulu (printed in 1857) was typical of his stylistic preference for accurate yet simplified descriptive details for specific buildings and various types of vessels in a scene populated with active figures drawn to scale. This work bears the printed inscriptions: “Drawn from nature on stone by G. H. Burgess” and “Printed by Britton and Rey”—a prominent firm of lithographers in San Francisco. His scenes depicting the Hawaiian peoples, the figure groups composed in the manner of academic European exemplars, show the artist in a more romantic vein.
FIG. 58. George Henry Burgess, Mining at Tunnel Hill, Jackson, Amador County, California, 1853. Watercolor on paper, 6¾ × 10⅛ in. Sacramento Archives & Museum Collection Center, Calif., Eleanor McClatchy Collection.
FIG. 59. George Henry Burgess, Mother Lode Inn, n.d. Watercolor on paper, 5 × 8¾ in. Louis A. Capellino.
After less than two years in the islands, apparently rejuvenated by their tranquil sojourn, the Burgess brothers returned to the vicissitudes of life in California. George soon became disillusioned with lithography. In letters to his mother in England, he wrote about his continuing quarrels with the owners and other employees at Britton and Rey over their assertions about the excessive amount of time he was taking for his drawings on the lithographic stones. Further disagreement ensued over the credits given to a minor collaborator, instead of to Burgess himself, as the principal draftsman in some of the published lithographs.5 George Burgess gave up lithography in favor of less collaborative forms of art that would allow him greater freedom of choice.
Settling in San Francisco after returning from Hawaii, Burgess established a studio and embarked on a career as a professional artist. In the 1855 San Francisco directory, he is listed as an engraver on wood at 121 Pine Street. Few examples of wood engraving attributed to Burgess are known today. Portrait commissions formed the bulk of his livelihood during the next two decades as an art patronage began to develop among the city’s wealthy and socially ambitious winners of the Gold Rush. His portraits were praised for the skill with which he rendered delicate lace on the ladies’ gowns. Burgess would have the subject of his portrait bring her fancy gown to his studio several days in advance of her sitting so that he could take more time to paint its decorative details.6 He was also in demand by photo galleries, to handpaint photographic portraits—a popular, affordable alternative to the more expensive traditional painted portraiture. Burgess was among the first artists to paint the scenic wonders of Yosemite in the late 1850s, but it is for the Gold Rush genre scenes that he is best remembered.
There were few opportunities for Burgess to exhibit his paintings publicly during the 1850s. The local Mechanics’ Institute did not hold exhibitions until 1857; Burgess showed portraits that year and watercolor landscapes in the 1858 exhibition.7 After two attempts in the 1860s to establish a viable artists’ association had failed, a group of prominent citizens, art patrons, and local artists, including George Burgess, founded the San Francisco Art Association in 1871. This was the beginning of regular exhibitions and patronage for the arts in California.
FIG. 60. George Henry Burgess, San Francisco in July, 1849, 1891. Oil on canvas, 62 × 143 in. Oakland Museum of California, gift of the Women’s Board.
In 1877 George Burgess was commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of James Clair Flood, a Forty-niner saloon keeper who later made his fortune in silver from the Comstock Lode. Flood built a monumental and ornate Victorian house called Linden Towers in the San Francisco suburb of Menlo Park, as well as the splendid mansion atop Nob Hill that survives today (renovated after the fire of 1906) as the home of the Pacific Union Club.8 It is not known if this portrait still exists. However, the painting that Flood commissioned from the artist in 1878, View of San Francisco in 1850 (see fig. 87), remains as an important record of San Francisco’s early history. It is presumed that Flood had ordered this comprehensive view of “old” San Francisco for the newly completed Linden Towers. Burgess was paid 
650 for the painting and an additional 100 for the frame.
As the port of entry for Gold Rush prospectors, San Francisco experienced a phenomenal surge of growth in a matter of months following news of the discovery of gold in California. By the fall of 1849, the population of the city had grown from about eight hundred to thirty-five thousand. During this period, a number of artists executed panoramic views of the city in drawings, watercolors, or paintings that served various purposes. Some drawings were reproduced on letter sheets that provided the miners with an illustration to accompany correspondence back home. Lithographic prints and book illustrations offered images of the fabled San Francisco that could be disseminated throughout the world cheaply. The paintings on canvas seemed to serve a higher artistic purpose that corresponds to the long-established tradition of history painting.
For George Burgess, a nostalgic look back from the 1880s also produced a painting titled San Francisco in July, 1849 (fig. 60) that would become the culminating experience of his professional life. Some time after 1891, Burgess himself prophesied: “That this picture is destined to reach the highest value, which any painting could have for this city or state, is evident. It is the infant village put before us, from which our great city has emerged.”9
George Burgess began work on his magnum opus in 1882. Over the next four years he was constantly involved with the research and preparation of this painstakingly accurate representation of San Francisco as it had appeared in the year before he himself had first seen it. A watercolor triptych made by William Birch McMurtrie in 1849 (see fig. 17 for part of it) was the source of the view and of many of the pictorial features of his great panorama. Burgess also consulted existing contemporary sketches, daguerreotypes, and lithographic views for confirmation of various topographical and structural details.
In his obsession for unassailable authenticity, Burgess sought to verify the factual aspects of the painting with testimonials signed by more than two hundred eyewitnesses who had been pioneers. They included two governors, a mayor, a former alcalde, and dozens of other prominent San Franciscans, some of whom had arrived before 1849.10 Burgess himself described the scene:
The visitor to San Francisco [circa 1890] would scarcely believe . . . that the brushy hill in the foreground of the picture is where the stock exchange now stands, and the sandy rises to the left where are the two horsemen is now Montgomery and Pine. The hill Lloma [sic] Alta of General Vallejo’s time, in the middle distance, is Telegraph Hill, from whence, for many years after the date of the picture, ships were signaled to the merchants of the little town, as they entered the Golden Gate. Between it and Russian Hill, the national flag flies over the Plaza, on which the red tiled adobe was used as the Custom House. In the foreground . . . corner of Montgomery and California was the Leidesdorff Cottage, which at the date of the picture was occupied by Captain George Stoneman (afterwards our Governor) who had charge of our city’s gold. . . . Some of the hundreds of vessels seen in the harbor, are unable to get away for want of seamen. . . . up the Clay Street Hill is the Post Office with its long file of applicants for letters.11
He had almost completed the scene by 1886 when he began his prolonged quest for a buyer. By the time it was finished (the copyright date is 1891), Burgess was wanting to sell the painting for ten thousand dollars. His repeated attempts to sell the canvas at that price met with failure—perhaps because it was painted so many years after the fact. In 1894 Burgess signed over his copyright to Elisha Cook of the H. S. Crocker Company of San Francisco to produce a chromolithograph of the scene. Eventually Burgess relinquished his control of the painting for a loan of two thousand dollars in gold on the condition that, if a buyer could be found at a higher price, he would repay the lender with interest. However, the artist was unable to make repayment and he lost the painting by foreclosure in 1897.12
George Burgess found his longtime efforts to create this historic panorama, San Francisco in July, 1849, and his failure to sell it, to be the most frustrating and disappointing experiences of his professional life. It is ironic that the painting, now in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum of California, is the work by which the artist is best remembered today.
FIG. 61 A. D. O. Browere, The Lone Prospector, 1853. Oil on canvas, 50 × 30 in. Oakland Museum of Calfornia, on extended loan from Hideko Goto Packard.
