Sentiment and Nostalgia

CHARLES CHRISTIAN NAHL, ERNEST NARJOT, GEORGE HENRY BURGESS, HENRY BACON, AND RUFUS WRIGHT

Harvey L. Jones

MUCH OF THE ART CREATED during that first decade following the historic discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 has itself become historically important as the beginnings of the visual arts tradition in California. Because the gold that served as impetus for their quest remained elusive for most of the artists, they soon reverted to the profession for which they trained. Initially their work was largely documentary: The Argonaut artists chronicled the places and events surrounding this epic phenomenon in drawings and paintings that functioned as eyewitness accounts. Soon the most talented and best-trained artists established their studios in the cities of Sacramento and San Francisco, where they offered a variety of artistic services to a growing population of prosperous patrons.

The artists, whose numbers were relatively small in the early years of the Gold Rush, were joined by printmakers and the practitioners of the growing art of photography to establish a rapidly developing community of artists and patrons that was flourishing by the end of the next decade. San Francisco emerged as the principal art center. As early as 1854, the owners of a book and stationery store converted the second floor of their premises into an art gallery, and hotel lobbies provided exhibition spaces for local artists.1 Other opportunities for public showing, such as the Mechanics’ Institute and state fairs, established in the late 1850s, served the Gold Rush artists as well as the influx of new arrivals in the 1860s.

During the Gold Rush, artists were called upon to provide their services as designers and illustrators for commercial applications that included panoramas, product labels, posters, pictorial letter sheets, membership certificates, advertisements, and book illustrations. Prominent artists such as the Nahl brothers, Harrison Eastman, George Burgess, and others drew hundreds of pictures for lithographs and engravings that were distributed throughout the world. These were the defining images of the Forty-niners and the scenes of the Mother Lode that have become enduring icons of the California Gold Rush.

Although few of the artists who searched for gold in the Mother Lode found much of the precious ore, they did discover metaphoric gold in the spectacular California landscape. Most Gold Rush paintings were genre scenes of mining activities and depictions of the lives of the Forty-niners. The landscape was, however, ever-present, sometimes insistent. Argonauts such as Thomas Ayres, George Burgess, and Frederick Butman were among the first artists to depict the wondrous scenery of the Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada in the late 1850s, scenery that attracted a host of landscape painters from the eastern seaboard and Europe during the next two decades. The landscape tradition began to dominate California painting in the 186os with the visits of such painters as Thomas Hill, William Keith, Albert Bierstadt, Virgil Williams, Julian Rix, and Juan Buckingham Wandesford, whose paintings of the wilderness became the new icons of California.

The artists’ own efforts toward a cooperative organization, unsuccessful at first, eventually culminated in the founding of the San Francisco Art Association in 1871. A group of resident artists, art patrons, and interested citizens met at the home of Wandesford to create an appropriate venue for regular exhibitions and patronage. Several of the artists who had arrived in the Gold Rush and were still in San Francisco, including George Burgess, Ernest Narjot, and Charles and Arthur Nahl, became members or frequent exhibitors. In 1874 the association established the first art academy in the West, with Virgil Williams as its director. Known then as the California School of Design, it continues today as the San Francisco Art Institute.

By the 1870s the public perspective on the Gold Rush era had significantly changed. Once an appreciation of the vicissitudes of daily life in a rough and tumble frontier, it had become a feeling of nostalgia for the colorful events of the Gold Rush as recounted from the selective memories of surviving Argonauts or interpreted by writers of fiction. Charles Christian Nahl, who through paintings and lithographic illustrations had been responsible for creating so many of the images associated with life in the Gold Rush, returned to the theme in the 1870s.

Nahl’s somewhat lugubrious subject of the Dead Miner, n.d. (fig. 82) was apparently derived from the last stanzas of an anonymous poem, Winter in the Mines, for which the artist provided seven vignettes to illustrate the text on a page published in the January 1859 issue of Hutchings’ Illustrated California Magazine.2

WINTER IN THE MINES

Lost! lost, upon the mountain top—

So thickly falls the snow,

In vain he turns—the path is lost—

He knows not where to go.

His faithful dog still follows him—

The miner has one friend,

Who will attend him faithfully

Unto his journey’s end.

And soon it comes, worn out, he falls

Upon the snow drifts high,

No friend to hear his mournful calls—

No one to see him die,

Except his dog, which constant still,

Leaves not his master’s side,

But bones of both, in future, will

Mark where the wanderers died.

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FIG. 82. Charles Christian Nahl, Dead Miner, n.d. Oil on canvas, 20 × 30 in. Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles.

The inspiration for the image of a fallen miner lying in the snow beside his howling dog appears to have been an engraving for Matthieu Laurent’s History of Napoleon, drawn by Nahl’s mentor, Horace Vernet. In Vernet’s illustration, a lone soldier lying dead is guarded by his dog.3 It is not known when or for whom Nahl’s sentimental version of the subject was painted. Records show that it was exhibited in the Mechanics’ Institute Fair of 1876.

Both the Dead Miner and Nahl’s most famous painting, Sunday Morning in the Mines, 1872 (fig. 81), had originated as lithographs during the late 1850s, and both took on subjective aspects of Gold Rush nostalgia, one sentimental, the other moralistic. In commissioning Sunday Morning in the Mines, Judge E. B. Crocker requested a painting typical of the life of the times. It remains the most important genre painting on a Gold Rush subject. Charles Nahl brought together all of his accumulated knowledge of painting and the imagery of the Gold Rush to create his masterpiece of narrative painting. For his story about miners of good and bad moral character, Nahl has given equal space to each issue in a composition that is divided in half vertically. The artist has distributed his principal dramatis personae along diagonal lines that begin at the lower corners of the painting and converge at a point above the center division to form a triangle that divides the rectangular format into multiple triangular shapes. The left side of the painting depicts the irresponsible activities of miners who are drinking, gambling, brawling, racing, and wasting their gold. The right side of the painting shows other miners engaged in more virtuous and industrious pursuits that include washing clothes, reading the Bible, and writing letters in their quiet observance of the Sabbath.

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FIG. 83. Charles Christian Nahl (attrib.), Forest Burial, n.d. Oil on canvas, 24 × 32 in. Collection of Eldon and Susan Grupp.

The artist’s moralistic allegory extends to his representation of still-life elements depicted in the foreground of the painting. In the sunlit portion on the right side, we see the implements of productive living: the mining equipment, the cooking utensils, and the wood-chopper’s ax. In the symbolic dark shadows of the shrubbery in the left foreground is scattered the discarded refuse of an ill-spent life that includes an empty whiskey bottle. The snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevada rise toward the sky in the distant background behind a Native American encampment that serves as a reminder of what was there before the arrival of gold-seekers. The iconography and all essential elements of the composition had been worked out by Nahl for an illustration titled Sunday in the California Diggings, dated 1857. He had already sketched themes for some of the vignettes as early as 1851.

Another painting on the subject of death in the Gold Rush era is a work that has recently been attributed to Charles Christian Nahl, Forest Burial (fig. 83). The unsigned sketch is apparently a preliminary study for a larger, unsigned painting of the identical subject that has been previously attributed to another artist. In a darkly wooded setting among yellow pines and sequoia trees somewhere in the Sierra, the artist depicts a group of four miners beside the open grave of a fallen comrade as they prepare to commit him to his final rest. Shown standing on a freshly dug mound of earth are three men with shovels poised as a fourth man stands beside the empty shroud, head bowed, hat in hand, in silent tribute before the grave of his departed friend. The artist has arranged the figures in a tightly structured pyramid shape within the overall landscape composition to impart a quality of ritual formality appropriate to the solemn occasion. The range of colors used in this study include the characteristic lavender, red violet, red orange, and russet hues of Charles Nahl’s distinctive palette.

In the 1870s and 1880s, when the dramatic events of the California Gold Rush began to take on mythic dimensions in the memories of many Forty-niners, the genre painters joined the novelists, playwrights, poets, and songwriters of the day in their romantic re-creations of the days of gold. Ernest Narjot was among those artists whose artful representation of lives of the miners, remembered or imagined, survive as chronicles of California’s history.

Narjot’s painting, The Forty-Niner, 1881 (fig. 84), is indicative of the changes in pictorial representation of Gold Rush themes from a realistic to a nostalgic perspective. This spacious interior view of a miner’s cabin contrasts sharply with the crowded confines shared by several men depicted in Charles and Arthur Nahl’s Saturday Night in the Mines, from 1856 (see fig. 42). Narjot’s painting presents a casual atmosphere of domestic self-sufficiency in a cozy one-man cabin outfitted with the traditional comforts of home. The French miners appeared to bring the comforts of civilized life with them. J. D. Borthwick, the artist—and occasional miner—who published an account of his three years in California during the early 1850s, specifically remarked on this propensity.

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FIG. 84. Ernest Narjot, The Forty-Niner, 1881. Oil on canvas, 40 × 50 in. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Calif., gift of Marguerite V. West and Mr. Charles H. King.

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FIG. 85. Ernest Narjot, Miners: A Moment at Rest (Gold Rush Camp), 1882. Oil on canvas, 40 × 55½ in. Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles.

Of all the men of different nations in the mines, the French were most decidedly those who, judging from their domestic life, appeared to be the most at home. Not that they were a bit better than others able to stand the hard work and exposure and privations, but about all their huts and cabins, however roughly constructed they might be, there was something in the minor details which bespoke more permanency than was suggested by the generality of the rude abodes of the miners. It is very certain that . . . they did “fix things up” with such a degree of taste, and with so much method about everything, as to give the idea that their life of toil was mitigated by more than a usual share of ease and comfort.4

Narjot’s painting is not merely a pictorial documentation of observable facts, but also an artistic interpretation of a concept. The artist has taken pains to provide a wealth of specific details in various still-life groups of objects that allude to basic needs in the miner’s daily life: the placer miner’s tools of pick, pan, and shovel; the handy dipper in a bucket of drinking water; the tabletop eating utensils with tin cup and plate; laundry drying on a clothesline above a glowing fireplace; and the miner’s bed, complete with a flour-sack pillow, all of which set the stage for a brief, sentimental episode as the Forty-niner, seated beside his faithful dog, reads a letter from home during a moment of relaxation. Narjot’s idealized scene of the solitary miner’s life away from the daily diggings is a poetic reflection on the virtues of hard work and the rewards of a simple life. The physical hardships of the miner’s actual life, as described in 1852 in one Argonaut’s letter, are little in evidence:

A Person thinking of coming to California ought to consider whether he can stand to work all day, under a hot sun, up to the knees in water and mud, shoveling or pumping as the case may be; cook his breakfast, and his supper at night, chop wood, bake bread, wash and mend clothes, &c. If he is content to do all these things and run the risks of the journey, then he can come to California. If not, he is better at home.5

Ernest Narjot’s nostalgic tableau Miners: A Moment at Rest (Gold Rush Camp), dated 1882 (fig. 85), is an artful re-creation of a day in the lives of a company of Forty-niners, and a reflection upon Nahl’s Sunday Morning in the Mines. Narjot’s depiction of a group of miners at leisure closely parallels the theme of the virtuous miners represented in the right half of Nahl’s epic allegory of morality in the Gold Rush. The miners’ leisure activities in Miners: A Moment at Rest include a game of cards that appears to be merely a pleasant pastime, not a means for gambling. Narjot’s composition follows Nahl’s example by first directing attention to the central group of figures and next leading the observer’s eye from one still-life vignette to the next around the edges of the painting before bringing it to rest again on the tight arrangement of figures depicted at the doorway of the cabin. The artist has developed a chain of visual contact between the figures that focuses attention on the bearded man reading the newspaper. The influences of Nahl’s painting extend to the remarkable similarity in the appearance of the bearded central characters in both pictures. However, Narjot’s painting technique, executed in the loose, spontaneous brushwork of the mid-nineteenth-century French manner, is representative of a sophisticated “modern” approach popular in the 1880s that owes very little to the crisp definition and polished surfaces of Nahl’s distinctive, but by then passé, style.

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FIG. 86. Ernest Narjot, French Gold-Seekers in California, 1884. Oil on canvas, 15½ × 23 in. Collection of James McClatchy.

Ernest Narjot was only one among the great influx of French citizens from all levels of society that arrived in San Francisco in the early years of the Gold Rush. People of many professions and occupations came to make their fortunes and to add their contributions to California’s cultural blend.6 Narjot celebrates his own pride as a pioneer of French origin in his nostalgic 1884 depiction French Gold-Seekers in California (fig. 86). It is conceivable that the artist included himself among the three prospectors panning for gold in this iconographic Gold Rush genre painting. The narrative aspect of the scene is conveyed by expressions of anticipation revealed in the faces of the men whose attention is focused on the gold pan. Consequently, Narjot has also directed the viewer’s attention to the depicted pan—perhaps to see a few of the precious nuggets.

By the late 1870s San Francisco was already a culturally well-established city with a growing arts patronage. Some of the city’s elite citizens wished to celebrate San Francisco’s progress with paintings that would document its Gold Rush origins. As part of this nostalgia, James C. Flood commissioned George Burgess to paint a fixed memory of the city, View of San Francisco in 1850 (fig. 87).

Since his arrival in 1850, George Burgess had been an eyewitness to much of the early development of San Francisco. In 1878, when Burgess undertook the commission, he augmented his own memory of the city with references to other visual documents created on the spot in 1850. For his View of San Francisco in 1850, Burgess enlarged the image from a sketch made by John Prendergast, another English-born artist, many of whose historically accurate city views and depicted events were translated into lithographs and book illustrations.7

Burgess produced his own preliminary watercolor study of this historic San Francisco scene for the Silver King, James C. Flood, as well as another related watercolor with the same title for Sam Brannan. It was Brannan,8 himself a prominent figure in the city’s history, who established San Francisco’s first newspaper, The California Star, and was widely reputed to have been the man who first brought news of the gold discovery to San Francisco.

The panoramic View of San Francisco in 1850 looks east from the Clay Street hill on which are a number of tents pitched by prospectors in transit. The view extends toward the old Grand Plaza (Portsmouth Square), which originally was almost at the waterfront. Beyond the wharves at the center of the painting can be seen the many ships, abandoned by crews afflicted with gold fever, that block San Francisco harbor. In the background is Yerba Buena Island, the distant hills of Alameda and Contra Costa counties in the East Bay, and the present sites of Oakland and Berkeley. Burgess has re-created a moment in history with an unpretentious view of San Francisco that depicts virtually every building standing in the spring of 1850. Interesting genre touches include a cattle roundup at far left, the long queue at the post office on Clay Street near center right, and a couple of men on horseback pausing to chat with two women and a child at the right foreground.

Historical paintings of this type seemed to be part of a growing nostalgia for the Gold Rush that occurred some thirty years after the discovery of gold. Many of the Forty-niners had begun to reinterpret their memories of a great adventure in individual enterprise as something more selfless—part of a greater national achievement. Literature, popular song, poetry, and the visual arts were all part of a romantic reevaluation of this event. Nostalgia for the Gold Rush embraced the complete range of human experience with idealized and often sentimental depictions of the past as popular in literature as in painting. Bret Harte, San Francisco’s first literary master, came to California in 1854 as a school-teacher before trying his luck as a miner. He became editor in 1868 of the Overland Monthly in San Francisco, a publication in which many of his own stories and poems were initially published. His descriptions of the lusty, humorous, and sometimes tragic life of mining camps in the Mother Lode are part of America’s cultural legacy from the Gold Rush. Harte’s earliest and best-known work is The Luck of Roaring Camp, a sentimental story of an orphaned infant adopted by a community of reckless miners and gamblers, whose lives were affected by the responsibility. Death was not uncommon in the mining settlements, but a birth was rare. This story inspired more than one artist to paint his version of the event. Henry Bacon, a talented artist from Boston who had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, painted The Luck of Roaring Camp in 1880 (fig. 89). He chose to illustrate the scene in which the anxious crowd of men arrived at the cabin to view the newborn citizen of Roaring Camp—whom they named Luck. The baby boy was wrapped in red flannel and placed in a wooden candle-box resting on a crude pine table and next to an upturned hat. “Gentlemen will please pass in at the front door, round the table, and out at the back door. Them as wishes to contribute anything toward the orphan will find a hat handy.”9 Virtually the same scene was chosen for an undated illustration titled He Rastled with My Finger, by Frederic Remington, and a similar painting, another Luck of Roaring Camp, from 1884 by Oscar Kunath (fig. 88).

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FIG. 87. George Henry Burgess, View of San Francisco in 1850, 1878. Oil on canvas, 41 × 72 in. Private collection, courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Galleries, N.Y.

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FIG. 88. Oscar Kunath, The Luck of Roaring Camp, 1884. Oil on canvas, 42¼ × 55⅜ in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Mrs. Annette Taussig in memory of her husband, Louis Taussig. 26562

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FIG. 89. Henry Bacon, The Luck of Roaring Camp, 1880. Oil on canvas, 30 × 47½ in. Post Road Gallery, Larchmont, N.Y.

Harte’s stories may also have been the inspiration for a Gold Rush subject by Rufus Wright, an American painter of anecdotal genre scenes. The Card Players, 1882 (fig. 90), is a depiction of the interior of a mountain cabin in which three men, a miner, a gambler, and a gun-toting cardplayer, cardsharps all, are playing euchre with a young Chinese man stereotypically depicted. This whimsical tale of a Chinese gambler who “wins the pot” from three disgruntled white men might almost be an illustration of Harte’s satirical ballad, Plain Language from Truthful James (also known as The Heathen Chinee), which swept the country in the 1870s.

A pervasive xenophobia was responsible for much of the hostility among racial and ethnic groups during the Gold Rush. The English-speaking American’s fear and distrust of foreign miners, who were competing for the best claims, resulted in animosities that were sometimes reflected in the art and literature of the times. Hostility toward the Chinese reached a peak in San Francisco during the 1880s. In the aftermath of the Gold Rush, and with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the great influx of industrious Chinese immigrant laborers was perceived by the white population to be the cause of widespread unemployment and the economic depression of the 1880s, which was exacerbated by the collapse of the Nevada silver boom in 1878.

A decline in the sales and commissions for paintings brought about by the depression prompted many artists to leave San Francisco permanently during the 1880s. Local artists complained also of a shift in artistic taste among San Francisco’s wealthy patrons toward a preference for European art. By this time the San Francisco Art Association’s California School of Design was training the first generation of California-born artists. Typically they would continue their art studies in Europe, usually in Paris, for a few years before returning to establish their own distinctive artistic legacy that by then, as much as fifty years later, owed little to the influence of the California Gold Rush beyond a healthy respect for the pioneer spirit.

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FIG. 90. Rufus Wright, The Card Players, 1882. Oil on canvas, 24¼ × 29½ in. Oakland Museum of California, Kahn Collection.