USA > California > History of California, Volume V > Part 29
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It is then, in this American and Californian inquiry, not so much an estimate of art values that we are seek- ing, as the revelation of the human spirit, the temper of a civilization that has produced so prodigiously in so many ways and so meagrely in the way of art.
Art makes this confession of its time. Where there are so few notable examples of art to brood upon as in the
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American vista, the brief essayist must, perforce, brood equallyupon the social revelation and the social contrasts.
The arts with which we deal here, require for their orderly growth and flowering, a quiet unattainable in a new and lusty civilization; the absence of art does not of necessity indicate an absence of a wide-spread (though unconscious) appreciation of beauty. These pioneers of America and of California were encountering natural beauty in its abundance and freshness. Surely this prevailing beauty in the field of their excited enter- prise, did win their response, even though they were too busy to translate it into consciousness and so, into the terms of art.
It would be interesting to trace the delight in natural beauty in the contemporary literature of the young America-for literature did, almost appallingly devote itself to nature and the theologic deduction from nat- ural aspects. But our task is to trace the less sponta- neous arts that have, unlike literature, to make terms with the current civilization in order to win a place and a voice. Speech and writing travel with so easy and light an equipment, they can foot it with the pio- neers; the graphic and monumental arts must delay until the hearths are established and the time has come to build the temple. They move with the encumbrance of a tradition, they require material things for their expression-most of all, they require the serenities of a civilization established and the response assured.
It is with tradition that the historian picks up his thread, for tradition is an essential strand. That tra- dition runs straight to America from the cultural
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centers of Europe with the coming of the colonists; it weaves into the texture of that early life and shines suddenly as a new, bright thing in the domestic and public buildings of the Atlantic sea-board which we very properly name "Colonial." The tradition of European art is preserved and yet is translated into a new refinement and delicacy, indicative of a new choice and new predilections.
This refinement, this attenuation of the material employed, is the first speech in art of the recognizable new spirit-the American spirit. It stands as a reality in that architecture; but it appears, too, in every object that the American of that time molded for his use or his pleasure-in the early furniture, the "American" ax-handle, the "American" wagon. We see the spirit intuitively attenuating, refining, as though in an exqui- site impatience that it must deal with material things at all; yet with supreme intelligence fitting the material to its perfect use.
How wide-spread this intuitive predilection was, has not been measured. It found its consummation, not in the architecture that so modestly blossomed on the Atlantic sea-board, but on the sea itself.
The American sailing ships! Those slim, unsung heralds that we set upon the seas of the world, to pro- claim by every shining spar, by each adroit line of their swift bodies, that a new race of builders and conquerors had found their voice in America. Surely, our ships must continue to rank as the triumph of that early spirit's expressiveness.
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The ship persisted long after our architecture had anything to say of the spirit's first fine rapture; and the ship, even now, sinks below our unsteady and changing horizons.
If then, it required fully a century of progressive community life for the descendants of the English race in America to evolve what was distinctive in architec- ture on land and sea, we should not be impatient in our contemplation of the art of the century that fol- lowed. It would be an unthinking critic who would ask that just that tradition of refinement verging upon fragility, be maintained by America, 'bride of change' as she is.
The inrush upon the young states of alien peoples; the conquest of the great territory to the west; most of all, the introduction of the machine in the processes of the world's manufacture-who in reason can ask coher- ency in the art of a nation, under revolutions of such magnitude?
Architecture fell from her delicate preoccupation with style; painting lapsed from the refinements and reserves of Copley and Steuart and both together sank into a universal disregard and a universal dowdiness. Sculpture practically had not existed as an independent art in the early time; and when she rose in the Nine- teenth century, she was stamped with an even greater dowdiness than that worn by her sister arts. One can guess from her aspect, how completely art had become a thing apart from the general life-speaking in the strangest tongue to these American admirers, if it spoke at all in the arid marble portraits and the "chaste" nudes.
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They speak now to us indisputably the fact that the contemporary American was not thinking or feeling "Art" at all. And it was just into this poor estate, that California entered when she became American. Yet through this period of neglect, we can follow our thread here and there as it gleams in individual works by solitary artists; and the thread suddenly gleams and shines again, in that little Renaissance of the arts that was nourished in the eighties by La Farge, McKim, White, and St. Gaudens, culminating in the exposition at Chicago in 1903. It was a phenomenal recapture of the early American spirit; as it was, beautifully and pathetically, the last word of that first American speech.
We caught the echo of it in California; we too, had our brief period of absorption in architecture as an art; there was a moment when the popular sympathy was involved, really responded to the work of art. The artists here, as in New York and Chicago, were express- ing some vital thing that the people wanted to have said: the artists were speaking the speech of the American spirit again: that was all the reason.
The brief moment of illumination and mutual interchange and mutual understanding, passed; and now we wait for the newer language to be evolved from the bewildering prolixity of our present polyglotism.
Californian art has, of necessity, been more less an echo of the national state of things; but interestingly enough, she has caught the echoes of a wider field than the national. It has been her exceptional good fortune in more than the arts, to escape, in spite of her isolation, the blight of provincialism.
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Her history begins with the resounding names of Cabrillo, Vizcaino, and Drake. Continuously have influences poured in upon her from east and west; and if in the arts her speech has been hesitant or delayed, it may be because of too many voices-too many echoes.
What the earliest of the explorers of these coasts found in the matter of art, humble as it was, was yet complete and perfect as an expression of the native life. The crude woodwork of the aboriginal house and canoe; the basketry for storage and utensils, the simple imple- ments of the chase and for gaming, the leather and shell-work-all these objects afford us now, a picture of the people and the life they lived: so adequately reconstructs the scene for us, that the question pre- sents itself, as to whether just this power of communi- cation, is not the test of "value" to be applied to any work of art out of the past?
Truly these Indians of the lowest state of culture did leave a perfectly readable record of themselves and what desire for beauty was in them. Art is, of course, the fine flower of a people's existence, their highest expression; we know, that within its savage limitation, the life of this primitive people was so far coherent that they could give this entirely comprehensible account of themselves to the future. What is present in each of these sad relics, is the testimony that for them, art was an integral part of life: not a thing whimsically fostered or crowded aside.
Their art was far advanced when the first vessels of the explorers touched upon the coast. It is still prac- ticed in obscure places for the love and need of it; and decadently for profit, where it is most to be seen. It
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has no place in our tradition and cannot be worked in, however curiously the effort persists to drag it into the arts of decoration. Its worth to us is purely that of record, and in its appeal to our understanding of these vanished fellow creatures.
If they, poor things, welcomed the first of us as gods (the first of us being the gentlemen adventurers of the Golden Hinde, straight from the court and city of the depraved Tudors), what did they, the natives, make of that first work of European art planted upon the land which is now California and which was then proclaimed "New Albion"?
It is deeper than amusing to think that here were sounded first the sonorous and solemn phrases of English speech in the great language of the "Book of Common Prayer," but the smile comes to our lips when we learn that the first work of art left upon the land which is now the United States of America, was the penny portrait of the Virgin Queen of England!
The old diarist records: "At our departure hence, our Generall set up a monument: namely a plate, nailed upon a faire greate poste with her Highnesses picture and armes, in a peece of six-pence of current English monie, under the plate." Thus the thread of traditional art first gleamed upon the coast of California and ties us to the England of Elizabeth and Leicester, of Shakespeare and Francis Bacon.
The incident counts for us only as it enriches the long backward reach of our survey; the Golden Hinde lost in the distance: the gods vanished; and the bereft native gazing in perplexity at the minute image of the most notably artificialized female in history, in her monstrous
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ruff and her monstrous arrogance! It is a juxtaposition to appeal to the Comic Muse-and what wouldn't we give now for that same "peece of six-pence"?
It was nearly two hundred years before the native was confronted by any other work of art of European lineage. The coming of the padre and the setting up of the cross cannot be classed with the incidental. Here was a substantial historical event.
These missionaries and explorers and conquerors, marching northward from Mexico, planting the mis- sions and the presidios from San Diego to Sonoma within the half century, did a work that has not been adequately measured as a building accomplishment.
To have builded by native labor and of the most primitive materials the twenty-one missions and settle- ments, while the work of conversion and conquest was going forward, is a noble record. It may be said that to engage the populace in labor, was the perfect way to subject and so to convert; but if the native had mar- velled at the penny queen, how much more deeply must he have marvelled at these structures, which rose with the help of his own hands? The missions vary in value: few of them make the slightest claim to art, but all have the virtue of directness and of graciously belonging to the landscape.
The friars had come to a land reminiscent in every feature of the old Spain, with its wide sun-burned valleys and its strong hills, set between the sierras and the blue sea. They planted, upon perfectly selected sites, these simple buildings, more truly "Spanish Colonial" than are the buildings of the eastern states "English Colonial." We do not know how the plans
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and elevations were produced. They were apparently largely the product of old and pleasant memories ap- plied to the new conditions of building, with the strange material and the poor skill at hand.
Here and there however, as at San Luis Rey and preëminently at San Antonio of Padua, hints of a schooled taste and knowledge come in. San Antonio hidden in its distant valley and its ruin mitigated by blossoming pomegranates and oleanders, has an art that none of its brethren can show. Its great arch of burnt brick (which still survived a few years ago) proclaims an audacity that could hardly have been ventured by any but a trained architect.
Yet these delightful and appropriate buildings and the whole brave record they embodied, from the moment of American occupation seem to have taught no lesson, as they have called forth no protective care on the part of the public: except where they have been attractive to the curiosity of sight-seers and tourists they have been permitted to fall into shameful ruin.
The padres brought little to California in the way of art to match their fervor and enterprise in building. Of the paintings that came up the coast from Mexico, there is never a hint of the sought masterpiece: and the colored wooden sculpture which was to be imported later, is of a like commonplaceness. Nothing which they brought compares with what they themselves made on the spot. They taught the natives to work agreeably in wood and clay and leather; and (one idly enough speculates) had the Sierras and the sea become impregnable barriers just at that moment, what
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extraordinary and delightful things might not have issued in art, from this domination and instruction of the native race? The results would not have been of the emptiness of any human significance that our "revivals" in the way of "mission furniture" and "Swatsika" pottery, now present.
The friars and the native artisans were scattered before the wind of change, and so far as art is concerned, nothing was effected except what still remains to be learned from the ruinous old examples of their high emprise.
One cannot leave out, for the sake of the touch of romantic color the mention confers, the brief occupation by the Russians, with their forts and stockades enclos- ing the chapel and barracks at Fort Ross. That little group of log buildings, set at the foot of the Coast Range and against the bleak sea, is memorable. There were orchards and a garden with its quaintly domed summer house in the Slavic manner. Nothing remains there now, but the governor's residence and the log causeway from the beach. There is no possibility of tying this strange, loose end into the thread of influence. The occupation was as little contributary as the transit of the Golden Hinde along the same stretch of coast, even though the Russian apple trees still yield their fruit and the Russian roses, hard colored and sweet, still bloom and shake in the wind.
The earliest Americans caught the high tide of Spanish occupation and turned it back. The artist had begun his work in the Spanish houses: for itinerant and now nameless portrait painters there were, who moved from settlement to settlement and painted the
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dons and senoritas. How good this first painting was, is an inquiry that is likely to be made in the future. This historian recalls examples seen in youth in Santa Barbara, Monterey, and Martinez, which looked down from the walls of high, dim rooms, with the aspect of having the best tradition in their keeping; they matched, these portraits, in courtesy and dignity, the living descendants of the pictured departed. For in these same rooms were even then, at that late day, manners and the art of intercourse and one saw even then, how the portraits and their possessors and the manners, were meeting adversities, were all to be lost and hustled away as superfluous in the new age; as superfluous as the missions themselves.
But these first hustlers brought with them something of their own established serenities and something of tradition in building and ornament and manners, which asserted itself as soon as they began to settle. That same English colonial architecture (grown heavier and coarser from having encountered the wave of pseudo- classicism that swept America in the forties), came to California along with such names as Benicia and Anti- och, and set its stamp upon the homely, pleasant courthouses and dwellings that still delight us in the central California towns.
The larger communities had little to do with it: the style had become rural and suburban in its passage across the continent and unfitted for city building. In the cities a very agreeable manner was substituted that yet held with tradition. These buildings of brick and covered with stucco, still make wholly for the observer's pleasure in Sacramento, in Marysville (as in the old San
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Francisco), as they repeat themselves with a discreet variety in all the shady streets. There is no question of their being "Art"; they offer merely the pleasantest most modest little facades, winning their chief distinc- tion from the contrast they present to what immediately followed them and jostled them out of popular favor in the seventies and eighties.
In San Francisco, however, in these same years between 1850 and 1870, really notable buildings were erected, which stood in the older quarters of the town and impressed the observer with their grace and power, quite up to the hour of conflagration.
This architectural accomplishment has never been satisfactorily accounted for. The names of the archi- tects were early lost, and lacking any reliable data and in the presence of work so much beyond what the rest of America had to show for that same period, an amus- ing body of legend gathered about them and was current in the talk of local enthusiasts, in which the names of the most distinguished European architects grandly figured. Where so much that was unexpected and romantic had happened, it seemed quite within the possibility that anyone might have laid his hand upon the young town and left for us the testimony of his talent. Certain it is, that these buildings were the design of trained intelligences, and the conclusion must be inferred that so much intelligence and taste was not locally concentrated, but that communication with Europe being regularly established, commissions for the drawings were placed in the hands of men practicing in Paris and London.
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The local French community was large and influential and if the two French bankers immortalized themselves by commissioning Meryon to execute the first etched view of San Francisco, it seems altogether possible that the designs of certain of the buildings came as straight from the ateliers of Durban and Garnier.
Apart from surmise, there were gifted architects practicing in San Francisco, men like Patten, the beauty of whose Gothic manner was shown in the old Grace church and the Synagogue. There was restraint within and respect for the tradition of art everywhere evi- denced, that meant nothing less than that the populace too, was maintaining something of the old forms and the good manners they had brought from the older civili- zation and weaving it into the new. They built homes: agreeable houses and gardens planted themselves upon the hills with a promptitude that was indicative of an inner stability and orderliness in the community; and they built churches, even while the "Eldorado" was dazzling the "transients" with its mirrors and "high stakes" and the atmosphere of the mining camp still hung over the town.
Literature has never sufficiently celebrated our respectabilities; the testimony to this delightful period of sedate life (not without its enlivening contrasts) rests almost entirely now in memories, such as are embodied in the strange "Chronicle of Manuel Alanus" and in the old photographs and lithographs of the time.
We have hung upon architecture because it bulks as the popular and revealing art. Painting was practiced obscurely. Sculpture appeared only in the ornamen- tation of the buildings: their stucco decorations being
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of no mean order, and where it occasionally broke away into the freer forms of life and the human figure, it did so in a manner showing capacity for true sculpture of merit.
We did, however, at this time, indulge almost inordinately in delineation by lithography. Here the artist had his fling-upon the letter papers showing views: in the broadsides picturing current events; tran- sitory things, but posted to the ends of the earth. They were sober and respectable productions and historically they furnish a record surprisingly rich.
One of these faded blue sheets pictures the group of the first Chinese participants in a Fourth of July parade in San Francisco. The incident is momentous, as we look back upon our history. In the history of our art it signalizes a new and wonderfully rich influence; how- ever we may regard it as alien, this oriental thread has the substantiality of a rope.
We cannot incorporate it as an entity in the texture that we are now weaving, but filaments of its splendor and dignity as Chinese, of its exquisiteness as Japanese, will inevitably weave in more and more as the barriers of nationality go down under the assaults of the spirit of human brotherhood.
If the artists of Europe were, at the moment of this first invasion of our coasts, opening their eyes to the lessons taught in art by these same orientals, we on our side of the world, in our out-post community, were taking coolies by the wagon load directly from the steamer landing, to the old "Bank Saloon," that they might gaze with equal wonder, though with probably
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less edification, upon a French canvas of ordinary merit, whereon was pictured the "Sleeping Samson Shorn by Delilah."
It was the "chaste" nude again. What they made of it, these simple Chinese-what they made of this first initiation to just what western art had to offer them, we cannot guess. The incident may have a lurking hint of allegory or prophecy in it, but its humor justifies its recording here.
The Chinese instantly began to offer us of their stored richnesses; they imported works of art and lavishly decorated the fine old buildings they occupied. They did not build, except here and there an outdoor altar and notably, the one perfect little temple beside the river at Marysville. But the stream of importation has continued and this flood of examples of a great art must ultimately yield an effect.
Its strength is diluted in the passage through the Japanese, and the west has already accepted that mitigated and very charming tradition; we shall touch upon that influence in California a little later: some- thing happens between.
This happening was the whirlwind of the "Big Bonanza" years; all threads were apparently snapped short.
It was a powerful era of powerful men: an era of greed in getting and lavishness in spending and of a vulgarity such as the world had never before suffered. Here in California it happened that the flush times fell upon us when in the arts of the western civilizations
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there was no steadying tradition. Something had held over in California, of what the rest of America had lost: but this remnant was to be pushed aside ruthlessly enough, from the path of gross wealth. The masters of wealth dominated the scene so tyrannously that what art there was or whatever tradition, instantly succumbed.
It would be interesting to know what became of the scholarly architects with their reserves and hesitations, and of the modest delineators in lithography. Great houses and hotels were erected, importations of works in sculpture and painting began to pour in for their adornment. The foreign gaudy examples went where they belonged: the town positively "bulged" with im- ported "Art." One wonders, did the modest lithog- raphers yield to the prevailing vulgarity, and taking service under Mammon, produce the shameless cari- catures of the gutter publications that were sold upon the streets of San Francisco at that time? In so great a social revolution, perhaps the conservative element that made the earlier San Francisco, was not fully aware of more than the stir and the prosperity, and went in and out of its decent residences, with only a gratified sense of sharing in an increased life-even perhaps, surreptitiously buying and chuckling over "The Jolly Giant" and its caricatures, not really con- scious that they and their civilization were in the clutch of a cyclone.
Money was so easy, that if the great getters and spenders began to distribute it in the purchase of works of art, they indiscriminately bought both bad
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and good; and it is at this time that painters of a merit seriously to be considered, came to and were supported in California. The Art School was inaugurated under the direction of Vergil Williams; and we pick up the thread just here, of our "connection," in the gracious courtesy of the French government's gift to the little institution, of casts from the masterpieces of sculpture in the Louvre. And it was not long before "the school" began to send the first of her pupils to Paris, with the "stumped" crayon examples of what they had learned from the French gift, under their arms-tender pioneers of Californian art.
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