April 2011 Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery Monthly
A Celebration of Early California, Western, and American Art ...
Open Wednesdays through Sundays 10:00 - 5:00 (other times by appointment)
1785 Coast Highway 1, PO Box 325, Bodega Bay, CA 94923, 707-875-2911 (Map)
email: Art@BodegaBayHeritageGallery.com | www.BodegaBayHeritageGallery.com

When it comes to offering an amazing array of fascinating historic California paintings, Stockton's Haggin Museum stands proudly among northern California's other great museums, San Francisco's de Young and the Legion of Honor, the Oakland Museum, and Sacramento's Crocker Museum

The Haggin features the largest display of paintings by Albert Bierstadt, accompanied with an array of works by William Keith, Thomas Hill, and Thomas Moran and famed Eastern and European artists. If you haven't been there yet, we highly recommend a visit to the Haggin Museum in your near future.

Albert Bierstadt loved California and its magnificent scenery. His epic canvases of the Sierras, of coastal California, and of scenes throughout the West are filled with wonder.

In his own time, and still today, some offer critiques of his work as being too majestic, a glorified version of nature, perhaps attacking Bierstadt for his extraordinary commercial success.

But Bierstadt was an extraordinary painter, and when viewers allow one of his paintings to work on them, they are taken on a spiritual journey with Bierstadt himself serving as guide. He shows the glory of nature in all its harmony, poetry, melody and rhythm. His paintings are symphonies in paint, compositions expressing his spiritual connection, appreciation, and admiration of what lay before him. Through his paintings, he is inviting us to share in that vision.

Stockton's Haggin Museum hosts the largest collection of Bierstadt paintings on display in one location anywhere, along with an array of works by French and American impressionists and post impressionists.

Along side the Bierstadts are works by Jean Beraud, Thomas Hill, Thomas Moran, William Keith, William Merritt Chase, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Childe Hassam, Ralph Blakelock, and William- Adolphe Bouguereau.

He was quite an up to date artist. Four years prior to the Civil War, Bierstadt took photos of the American Landscape, an emerging

technology at the time which was both bulky and complex. His photos and sketches of mountain ranges and dramatic rock formations would show up in his canvases later on. He painted the American West on a grand scale, capturing the imagination of viewers and catapulting himself into international fame. His paintings sold well and gave Bierstadt a level of success unknown by most other artists.

He was married in 1867 and visited London where he met Queen Victoria. His wife Rosalie needed to live in a warm climate for

health reasons, and the couple moved to Nassau in the Bahamas. He continued his work traveling throughout America and Europe, often returning for visits to his wife in Nassau.

It is surprising he did not do more paintings of the sea. Having grown up in New Bedford, CT, he certainly was exposed to the nautical way of viewing the world. Once in California, he did make studies of the sea. In 1872 he ventured outside the Golden Gate to visit the Farallon Islands where he sketched rugged rock formations, crashing waves, and sea lions.

Although not known for his wildlife paintings, he certainly was impressed by wildlife. Beginning in the 1870's he began painting wild animals. His animal paintings linked Bierstadt with other notable European paintings, Sir Edwin Landseer and Rosa Bonheur. Moose was painted after 1880, and is Bierstadt's way of honoring the animal

which he shot earlier that year in Maine, the eighth largest antlers in sporting history. The head with its massive rack was stuffed and hung on the wall in Bierstadt's studio.

A real gem offered by the Haggin is William Keith's Mount Tamalpais, a confident example of Keith's mastery of achieving depth and a distant atmosphere bathed in moist shadow.

Albert Bierstadt Yosemite Valley, Lake in Yosemite Valley, oil on canvas
36 1/8 x 52 in, (1863-1875)

The offer of these paintings was made to the San Joaquin Pioneer and Historical Society which set a goal of establishing a history museum in Stockton telling the story of Stockton's role as a major center of California's Central Valley.

The San Joaquin Pioneer and Historical Society was unsuccessful in gaining much in funds to launch their project, and the offer from Elia Haggin McKee was most welcome and readily accepted. It not only came with a wealth of paintings, but with thirty thousand dollars to construct a building to house the collection. The only condition was that the museum was to be named for her father. Louis Terah Haggin. Thanks to the generosity of this gift, the Haggin Museum now serves two purposes, providing a window into the history of Stockton and the Central Valley, and as a well endowed art museum, featuring California, American, and European paintings of the late 19th century.

J. C. Leyendecker is best known for his poster, book and advertising illustrations, but in a greater sense, he established a way of telling the American story graphically, with humor, with sentimentality blended with substance. His works were not only pleasing to gaze upon, but they touched a commonality, a sense of our communal joy of being part of America.

Our contemporary vision of Santa Claus as a red suited jolly fat man trimmed in white fur was first popularized by Leyendecker. In the May 30, 1914 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, he did a cover of a bellhop carrying a bouquet of hyacinths. This lead to President Woodrow Wilson's declaring Mother's Day an official holiday. He covered most of Americana, from its love of baseball, to advertising Kelloggs cereals, and using his artistry to help in the war effort, creating enlistment posters and selling war bonds.

When we think of an artist capturing the essence of the purely American scene, we can't help but think of Norman Rockwell. But Rockwell's genius was not the product of his vision alone. He proudly stood on the broad shoulders of those who came before, and in his case, it was the shoulders of his friend and mentor, Joseph Christian Leyendecker. Today, we often think of Rockwell as the one who established the quintessential images of Americana, but Rockwell's accomplishments are a derivative of Leyendecker's artistry. Through their long friendship and association, Rockwell learned a great deal from Leyendecker.

When critics discuss Rockwell, the conversation often results in a visit to the question "illustration or art." Perhaps Leyendecker's comment to a similar question adds light to this issue. Leyendecker once quipped that he preferred that his art be reproduced and appreciated by the wider population than having a comparatively few see it in a museum or gallery.

But where was the twelfth painting? Sue Lee was most lucky. When she returned from Southern California, she learned that the twelfth painting was hanging in a local business and she was able to retrieve it for the museum. This one is different from the eleven others. Eleven were vertical and of the same dimensions, but the twelfth was horizontal, a depiction of Chinese Firehose brigade racing as part of a Fourth of July celebration in Deadwood, South Dakota.

What is great about this exhibition is that it is bringing new light to Jake Lee's art and his story telling. Today he is seen as a marvelous visual chronicler of the Chinese American past. Borrowing from the WPA style of watercolors done during the Great Depression, Lee composed scenes showing how Chinese laborers participated in building America and were participating citizens.

A watercolor artist and teacher, Jake Lee was best known as a commercial artist who did illustrations for magazines, greeting cards and book jackets. As a storytelling artist, he reminds Chinese Americans of how the Chinese were involved in numerous industries and endeavors. Lee's images challenge the stereotypes of Charlie Chan, Chinese laundrymen and "Hop Sing" houseboys and cooks. Jake Lee wanted to cause Chinese Americans to contemplate the kinds of lives lived by the early immigrants and to consider their contributions to the development of California.

Taken together, these twelve paintings are Jake Lee's Chinese American Suite. Together, they tell the epic tale of an immigrant people who came with hope and a willingness to endure hardship and work extremely hard. In sweat shops of Chinatown, the railroad crews of the Central Pacific, the vineyards and orchards of Sonoma County, and shrimp fishing on San Francisco Bay, and Sierra Nevada mining, day by day, the Chinese climbed the American ladder of success from the lowest rung upward. Along the way, they shared the joy of life and never forgot their roots, maintaining language and tradition, celebrating Chinese New Years with Lion Dancers and firecrackers, hanging Chinese lanterns, and keeping alive Chinese literature, culture, and theater.

Johnny Kan and Jake Lee were well matched as both tried to dispel inaccuracies about the Chinese in American life.

As a restauranteur, Johnny Kahn insisted on authentic Chinese cuisine. He used to say that "chop suey" was as Chinese as "Irish stew" was Irish. Herb Caen wrote, "Johnny Kan has elected to preside over a first-rate Chinese restaurant dedicated to all that is genuine and worthwhile in Chinese cooking. On his menu, you will find ... dishes that heretofore have been denied to all but the cognoscenti."

Jake Lee was keenly aware of how stereotypes were built, because he worked for a while as an extra in Hollywood. After the war, the Hollywood studios were looking for Asians to play Japanese soldiers for all kinds of war pictures. As Jake often told the tale, he appeared in many of these classic films often being killed off, then was changed into a different uniform by the wardrobe department, and sent back onto the set only to be killed again.

But as a painter, he wanted the story of the Chinese Americans to be told in all its truthful and realistic aspects, from the harshness of their labor to the sweetness of their cultural life and joy. He considered their part in the American story as worthy as any other group, and his Chinese American Watercolor Suite does just that. The exhibit runs through September 16th, and you now have an added incentive to visit Chinatown soon, and view and taste again the wonder of the Chinese American story

The four paintings not on exhibit are: Shoemakers in Massachusetts, 1870, Shrimp Camp at China Camp. Miners in the Mother Lode Country. and Lantern Making in San Francisco.

Artists Theodore Wores & Amedee Joullin,
Thoughts on the changing atmosphere of Chinatown

San Francisco’s Chinatown, the talked of, the written about, the visited -- it is passing.

Perhaps you don’t see it. that all depends upon what kind of an eye you are looking with.

If it be a financial eye, of course you don’t see it. Business was never better, say the merchants up Dupont street. Tourists come and go, faster and thicker year after year. the country is prosperous and there is money enough afloat to reach the rare old lacquers and porcelains and ivories that bring the righteous and the unrighteous profit.

If it be the eye of the statistician, you don’t see it. Population within those dozen blocks is on the rapid increase, you say. Where once a few pioneer Chinese huddled, now there are thriving families rearing plenty of small fry to fill the tenements even fuller.

Ah, but if it be the eye artistic! Then you know only too well that there is no longer in our midst a little, crowded treasure trove of Oriental colors that blend to harmony, of shaky walls and rotting structures that beg to be transferred to canvas. The artists have been robbed of their treasure, they say, and the robbery was committed by a Board.

Many men and women who are familiar with every nook and corner and all the devious ways of Chinatown stroll through the narrow streets these days and glance about regretfully, as they note a change in some doorway; the absence of some awning, or the addition of some modern device.

Out on the streets -- even down Fish alley, but more conspicuously in some of the wider avenues -- evidence can be found of the passing.

It was a good many years ago that Amedee Joulin painted Fish alley. He found it full of color, of rickety balconies and flapping awnings in varying shades. Into bamboo baskets were gathered bright colored paper scraps. The baskets have disappeared and a cart daily gathers all such refuse from receptacles less antique and more practical.

No wonder that Joullin is one of those to say that chinatown has had its day. A stroll through the crooked byways is to him like meeting an old friend in whom some sad change has taken place. Joullin of late has been painting Indians, but his Chinatown pictures were among his best.

In the days when Wores painted in Chinatown--it was Theodore Wores who back in the early eighties “discovered” its possibilities, although Jules Tavernier had worked there before--in desultory fashion, Wores painted the pictures that brought him many shekels from people like Earl Rosebery, Sir Thomas Hesketh and Mrs Hopkins Searles and introduced San Francisco’s Chinatown to the art connoisseurs of New York, Boston and London, there was not a vestige of whitewash, not a thought of renovation. He was looked upon by the people he painted as something of an interloper. The story is still told how, in order to get the interior of a josshouse (a place of worship enshrining both Buddhist and Taoist deities), he became a paid-up subscriber to the society. The piece of red paper on which his name is inscribed in odd hieroglyphics may be seen any day posted on the wall of the Sacramento-street josshouse in company with the names of hundreds of Chinese patrons. That slip of paper is an undisturbed memorial of the five years Wores spent among the Chinese. Perhaps more than any other, he has pictured their lives and customs, and a comparison of his paintings with the streets and interiors as seen today will quickly reveal in the difference of scene and color the mutability of art subjects.

The old Palace Hotel and the Royal, which once teemed with color and where in each room could be found material for a characteristic sketch, have the past year or so become as commonplace as the most practical Board of Health man could wish.

On every street some ornate little balcony, beloved by wielders of the brush, has been removed or painted over. Leaning walls have been straightened and loose boards on the older buildings have been nailed down. On the roofs odd effects secured from a vista in which clothes poles and ledges filled with blooming plants were deliciously mingled are seldom found now. there will be still other departures. One man who used to paint there declared the other day that the inhabitants themselves are coming to lack something that at one time made them excellent subjects for studies. Perhaps they, too, are yielding to the pressure of civilization, and while learning the use of English and soap they may be losing the distinctiveness that has hitherto made them so much worth while to artists. Were a man to begin painting there tomorrow, he would not, as Jules Pages did when he worked on his famous picture, the one that received honorable mention at the Paris salon of 1896 and that helped him to win finally the medal, have to have some one constantly by him to keep the inquisitive Celestials from hanging on his shoulders and his easel. They probably would glance at him from a distance unconcernedly.

Piexotto sketched in Chinatown last year, but he did not attempt color, a significant fact. It is said that he will have the distinction of being the last of the artists of any note to seek themes in Chinatown. Even the students, those who send broadcast calendars and Christmas cards, are looking elsewhere for studies, for, like the painters in oil and the many who have done exquisite things in water color and pencil, they feel the change that has gradually been transforming the locality, and they, too, no longer find inspiration there.

Chinatown is passing. with every bucket of whitewash the end is hastened.