Abstract
In his scholarship on art collecting in nineteenth-century Spain, Oscar Vásquez urges study of the philosophies of cultural philanthropy in conjunction with its key sites and practices in order to fully comprehend how art consumption articulates, consolidates, and perpetuates social identities. Through analysis of the cultural ecology of postbellum San Francisco, this essay argues that California’s entrepreneurial elites reorganized the regional art world, particularly over the course of the watershed decade of the 1870s. For leading patrons, art gradually but dramatically changed its function from educational philanthropy to a mark of class distinction; its audience, from a democratic commonwealth of art lovers to a tight clique of connoisseurs; its location, from a public forum to a sacred precinct; and its scope, from local to national markets and beyond.1
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Notes
“Acquisitions sites and procedures were inseparable from the discourses of collecting and, as such, helped to define differences among subject positions, that is, among individual and group identities” (Oscar E. Vasquez, Inventing the Art Collection: Patrons, Markets, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Spain [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001], 31). I borrow the notion of an “ecology” of art patronage from Albert Boime, “Entrepreneurial Patronage in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France ed. Edward C. Carter II, Robert Forster, and Joseph N. Moody (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) esp. 181–84.
See San Francisco Art Association, Constitution, By-laws, List of Members and Catalogue of Library, and Rules of the School of Design of the San Francisco Art Association (San Francisco: B. F. Sterett, 1878).
On the “Big Five,” see Cerinda W. Evans, Collis Potter Huntington (Newport News, VA: The Mariners’ Museum, 1954)
Oscar Lewis, The Big Four (New York and London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938)
K. D. Kurutz, “Sacramento’s Pioneer Patrons of Art: The Edwin Bryant Crocker Family,” Golden Notes 31, 2 (1985) 1–32
Norman E. Tutorow, Leland Stanford: Man of Many Careers (Menlo Park, CA: Pacific Coast, 1971). “General” David Douty Colton was a Maine native who parlayed a law degree and political connections into a real estate fortune; in 1874 he became a substantial investor in and executive of the CPR. Another major player in the Central Pacific was Wells Fargo Bank President Lloyd Tevis. Together with Irving M. Scott, Peter and James Donahue owned and operated the prosperous Union Iron Works, whose profitability precipitated holdings in gas, transportation, mining, banking, and real estate. Equally diversified were William Alvord, president of the Risdon Iron Works and one-time San Francisco mayor
William Ralston, president of the Bank of California and owner of the lavish Palace Hotel; banker Darius Ogden Mills. Finally, James Ben Ali Haggin, Lloyd Tevis, and George Hearst coordinated numerous investments in mining, financing, and real estate. Significantly, the few local plutocrats who could claim a true working-class background, mostly the Irish-born “Silver Kings” of the Virginia Consolidated Mining Company (James G. Fair, James C. Flood, John W. Mackay, and William S. O’Brien), engaged in collecting neither as extensively nor as early. Peter Decker, Fortunes and Failures: White-Collar Mobility in Nineteenth Century San Francisco (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) esp. 170–95
William Issel and Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986) 29–33
Gray A. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) 125–26, 211–12, 249–51
Judith Robinson, The Hearsts: An American Dynasty (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991)
Oscar Lewis, Silver Kings (New York and London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959)
Richard H. Peterson, The Bonanza Kings: The Social Origins and Business Behavior of Western Mining Entrepreneurs, 1870–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977).
Prominent figures on the cultural scene included Washington, D.C., banker William Wilson Corcoran, New York railroad barons John Taylor Johnston and Robert M. Olyphant, New York department store tycoon Alexander Stewart, and Philadelphia manufacturing and railroad executive Joseph Harrison. Among this later group, only clothing wholesaler Thomas B. Clarke could boast a career comparable to his prewar mercantile brethren. W. G. Constable, Art Collecting in the United States of America: An Outline of a History (Toronto and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964) 10–30, 141–43
Lillian B. Miller, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) 148–59
Frederick Baekeland, “Collectors of American Painting, 1813–1913,” American Art Review 3, 6 (1976) 121–48
Madeleine Fidell Beaufort and Jeanne K. Welcher, “Some Views of Art Buying in New York in the 1870s and 1880s,” Oxford Art Journal 5, 1 (1982) 48–53
Ella M. Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990) 11–17
Lance Lee Humphries, “Robert Gilmor, Jr.: Baltimore Collector and American Art Patron” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1998)
Carrie Rebora, “Robert Fulton’s Art Collection,” American Art Journal 22, no. 3 (1990) 40–63
Nicholas B. Wainwright, “Joseph Harrison, Jr.: A Forgotten Art Collector,” Antiques 102, no. 4 (1972) 660–68
Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the American Museum in the United States (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998) 22–37
Barbara H. Weinberg, “Thomas B. Clarke: Foremost Patron of American Art from 1872 to 1899,” American Art Journal 8, no. 1 (1976): 52–83.
Hubert Howe Bancroft, The History of California (San Francisco: The History Company, 1890) 7:693
Thomas G. Shearman, “The Owners of the United States,” Forum 9 (1889) 262–73. E. B. Crocker may have not made this list because either he had died in 1875, or Sacramento was too small a city at the time, or his estate’s value was less than $20 million.
Quoted in Carol A. O’Connor, “A Region of Cities,” in The Oxford History of the American West ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Conner, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 543.
Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 282.
Marx is cited in Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 242.
In its inaugural year, the Exhibition garnered almost 30,000 single admissions and twice as many season tickets in a little under one month; by the 1870s, daily attendance often approached 30,000. Ellen Schwartz, Nineteenth-Century San Francisco Art Exhibition Catalogues (Davis: Library Associates, University Library, University of California, Davis, 1981) 2
Birgitta Hjalmarson, Artful Players: Artistic Life in Early San Francisco (Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 1999) 24–25
B. E. Lloyd, Lights and Shades in San Francisco (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1876) 116–19
J. H. Culver, “The Building of a State: IX. The Mechanics’ Institute,” Overland Monthly 8 (1886) 314–24
John W. Wood, 75 Years of History of the Mechanics’ Institute of San Francisco (San Francisco: Mechanics’ Institute, 1930);and the Mechanics’ Institute annual Industrial Exhibition reports.
William Alvord, quoted in “San Francisco Art Association,” Alta California March 27, 1872, 1.
B. P. Avery, “Art Beginnings on the Pacific: II,” Overland Monthly 1, 2 (1868) 113–19
Julian Dana, The Man Who Built San Francisco (New York: McMill, 1937) 93
Raymond Wilson, “Painters of California’s Silver Era,” American Art Journal (1984) 73.
Julia Cooley Altrocchi, The Spectacular San Franciscans (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1949) 155
Carol Green Wilson, Gump’s Treasure Trade: A Story of San Francisco (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965 [1949])
Janet Lynn Roseman et al., Gump’s since 1861: A San Francisco Legend (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991).
On the phenomenon of studio as showrooms, see Kenneth John Myers, “The Public Display of Art in New York City, 1664–1914,” in Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics David B. Dearinger (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000) 40
Annette Blaugrund, The Tenth Street Studio Building: Artist-Entrepreneurs from the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists (Southampton, NY: Parrish Art Museum, 1997)
Linda Henefield Skalet, “The Market for American Painting in New York, 1870–1915” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1980) 11–22.
Malcolm Goldstein, Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 29.
On Europe, see Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) esp. 38–40, 241–43
Cynthia A. White and Harrison C. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Changes in the French Painting World (New York: Wiley, 1965)..
The quotes come from “Judge Crocker’s Fine Art Gallery,” Sacramento Bee December 27, 1873, 3. See also “Art Items,” San Francisco Bulletin September 18, 1871, 3
“Judge Crocker’s Art Gallery on Exhibition,” Sacramento Union, March 18, 1874, 3.
W. K. Vickery, Catalogue of Paintings Exhibited for the Benefit of the Maria Kip Orphanage (San Francisco, 1891)
The still-essential guide to Ruskin’s stateside reception is Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
Mary Ann Stankiewicz, “‘The Eye Is a Nobler Organ’: Ruskin and American Art Education,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 18, 2 (1984) 51–64
Charles Colbert, “A Critical Medium: James Jackson Jarves’s Vision of Art History,” American Art 16, 1 (2002) 18–35. The quotations appear in James Jackson Jarves, “On the Formation of Galleries in America,” Atlantic Monthly 6 (July 1860) 108
Jarves, Art Studies: The “Old Masters” of Italy (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1861) 13.
James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1869) 315
James Jackson Jarves, “Art and Artists of America,” Christian Examiner 75 (1863) 114–27.
Gunther Barth, “Metropolitanism and Urban Elites in the Far West,” in The Age of Industrialism in America: Essays in Social Structures and Cultural Values, ed. Frederic Cople Jaher (New York: Free Press, 1968) 158–87
Patricia Lawrence, “Four Mansions on Nob Hill in the 1870s” (M.A. thesis, University of California, Davis, 1976)
Olive Palmer, comp., Vignettes of Early San Francisco Homes and Gardens (San Francisco: Garden Club, 1935)
Carol M. Osborne, Museum Builders in the West: The Stanfords as Collectors and Patrons of Art, 1870–1906 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986) 27–29.
On the Stanfords, see Bertha Berner, Mrs. Leland Stanford: An Intimate Account (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1935) 19–20
Donald Clyde Ball, “A History of the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery and Its Founders” (M.A. thesis, College of the Pacific, 1955)
Richard V. West, “The Crockers and Their Collection: A Brief History,” in Crocker Art Museum: Handbook of Paintings, ed. Richard Vincent West (Sacramento: The Museum, 1979) 7–11
Numerous New York galleries appear in Arnold Lewis, James Turner, and Steven McQuillin, The Opulent Interiors of the Gilded Age (New York: Dover Publications, 1987) passim.
Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) 114–15
Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 7–9.
William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994) 44–45
Ambrose Bierce, “Editorial,” San Francisco Illustrated Wasp May 31, 1884, 4
Bierce, “Editorial,” San Francisco Illustrated Wasp August 5, 1882, 2. On Bierce’s Wasp, see Deverell, Railroad Crossing, 58–59
Ernest Jerome Hopkins, The Ambrose Bierce Satanic Reader (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968) 194–209
Kenneth M. Johnson, The Sting of the Wasp (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1967); 1–15
Daniel Lindley, Ambrose Bierce Takes on the Railroad: The Journalist as Muckraker and Cynic (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).
Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American Art,” Media, Culture & Society 4 (1982) 303.
Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Biography of Leland Stanford,” unpublished proofs (ca. 1888) 153.
My language here comes from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983).
“Amusements, Etc.,” Alta California October 31, 1868. On the San Francisco Mercantile Library, see Joyce Backus, “A History of the San Francisco Mercantile Library Association” (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1931)
Bradford Luckingham, “Libraries and Museums in Emergent San Francisco: A Note on the Pursuit of Culture in the Urban Far West,” Pacific Historian 17, 3 (1973) 4–11.
On the SFAA at the Mercantile Library, see “The San Francisco Art Association,” Alta California March 29, 1871, 1.
B. P. Avery, “Art in California,” The Aldine 7, 4 (1874) 72
Avery, “Etc.,” Overland Monthly 9, 2 (1872) 91.
G. William Domhoff, The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling Class Cohesiveness (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
Vasquez, Inventing the Art Collection 7, has noted similar trends in Europe during the period of 1839–1860.
One such local example may be found in T. A. Barry, “Art in California,” California Spirit of the Times July 1, 1876, 14.
Emile Alix Durand-Gréville, “Private Picture Galleries of the United States,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 36 (1887) 65–75
Earl Shinn [Edward Strahan], The Art Treasures of America (Philadelphia: G. Barrie, 1879–82). See also Emile Alix Durand-Gréville, “Private Picture Galleries of the United States,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 36 (1887) 65–75
Walter Montgomery, American Art and American Art Collections (Boston: E. W. Walker, 1889).
Dozens of articles on elites’ personal galleries can also be found in the wave of new journals from the period, including Art Amateur, Art Journal, The Collector and The Studio; see also Ruth Krueger Meyer and Madeleine Fidell Beaufort, “The Rage for Collecting: Beyond Pittsburgh in the Gilded Age,” in Gabriel P. Weisberg et al., Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910 (Pittsburgh: Frick Art and Historical Center, 1997) 315–16.
Charles R. Henschel, “A Personal History of Knoedler,” in The Rise of the Art World in America: Knoedler at 150 (New York: Knoedler, 1996) 10–11
S. R. Koehler, United States’ Art Directory and Year-Book (New York and London: Garland, 1976 [1882–84]), iii.
Carol Troyen, “Innocents Abroad: American Painters at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Paris,” American Art Journal 16, 4 (1984) 19–22
H. Barbara Weinberg, “Cosmopolitan Attitudes: The Coming of Age of American Art,” in Paris 1889: American Artists at the Universal Exposition ed. Annette Blaugrund (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989) 33–34.
On the tariff issue, see William J. Barber, “International Commerce in the Fine Arts and American Political Economy, 1789–1913,” in Economic Engagements with Art ed. Neil De Marchi and Craufurd D. W. Goodwin (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999)
Kimberly Orcutt, “Buy American? The Debate over the Art Tariff,” American Art 16, 3 (2002) 82–91.
Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977)
Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) esp. 51–94
Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality, 1700–1900 (New York: New York University Press, 1984)
William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) 100–10, 122–43
Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 239–42, 253–65.
In like fashion, Lawrence Levine figures high culture as a “cloak.” Pierre Bourdieu has alternatively categorized the arts as symptomatic of the bourgeois “withdrawal from economic necessity” and their “denial of the social world.” Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) 53–54, 596.
Paul Venable Turner, “The Architectural Significance of the Stanford Museum,” in Osborne, Museum Builders 93–97. Cesnola consoled the Stanfords for the loss of their 15-year-old son Leland Jr., lamenting that the young man’s loss was all the greater since he had shown an early interest in antiquities and “the art-training of our American people” (quoted in Osborne, 15). On Cesnola, see also Calvin Tompkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970) esp. 49–83.
Rachel N. Klein, “Art and Authority in Antebellum New York City: The Rise and Fall of the American Art Union,” Journal of American History 81, 4 (1895) 1560. On Boston, see Story, Forging of an Aristocracy 16–17
Neil Harris, “The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement,” American Quarterly 14 (1962) 545–566
Julia Rosenbaum, “Displaying Civic Culture: The Controversy over Frederick MacMonnies’ Bacchante,” American Art 14, 3 (Fall 2000) 41–57.
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976) 65
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Ott, J. (2010). The Manufactured Patron: Staging Bourgeois Identity through Art Consumption in Postbellum America. In: The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115569_16
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