May 26 – August 19, 2001 A Legacy of Early California Paintings: The Shumate Collection Art Special Gallery Presented by the Art Department

Paintings from the 19th century art collection of Dr. C. Albert Shumate are featured in the exhibition A Legacy of Early California Paintings: The Shumate Collection, on view at the Oakland Museum of California from May 26 to Aug. 5, 2001. Shumate, a medical doctor by profession whose passion was history, was one of the earliest collectors of California art. The 51 paintings in the exhibition, by more than 40 prominent artists, provide a pictorial record of much of California’s history and artistic life in the years between 1816 and 1916.

Louis Choris, Habitants de Californie, 1816, watercolor, pen on paper

The Shumate Collection represents a veritable Who’s Who of 19th and early 20th century California painters. Few of these paintings have been seen in other exhibitions or publications. The paintings, primarily oils but also watercolor and gouache, are on long-term loan to the museum from the heirs of the Shumate collection, Drs. Thomas and Jane McLaughlin.

Harvey Jones, senior curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California and curator of the exhibition, said, “We are very fortunate to have the use of this important private collection, which has been seen by very few people. It will augment and complement our own historical survey in the Gallery of California Art.”

The earliest paintings in the collection were produced by artists who accompanied the exploratory expeditions that visited the Pacific Coast during the early 19th century. The earliest work in the exhibition, Habitants de la Californie, 1816, is a watercolor depicting three native Californians as illustrated by Louis Choris for the Russian-sponsored Kotzebue expedition.

The establishment of the European tradition of easel painting in California began in the 1850s during the Gold Rush era, in San Francisco, Sacramento and around various mining sites in northern California. In addition to documenting the Gold Rush, artists painted the California wilderness and images of native Californians, early railroading, marine subjects and such popular San Francisco attractions as Fort Point, Cliff House and Chinatown. The exhibition includes Gold Rush paintings by Thomas Ayres, Frank Marryat, Henry Walton and Frederick Butman, among others. The most celebrated artist of the Gold Rush, Charles Nahl, is represented by William H. Walton’s copy of his long-lost painting, A Miner Prospecting.

“Romantic realism,” the principal stylistic movement among California landscape painters of the second half of the 19th century, is represented by such artists as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, William Keith, Juan B. Wandesforde, Ransom Gillet Holdredge, William Marple, Carl von Perbandt
and Virgil Williams. These California painters transformed the precisely detailed, idealized landscapes of the Hudson River school into a looser, more realistic style.

During the last decade of the 19th century, California landscape painting moved toward an evocation of mood or sentiment in the depiction of typical, yet often unidentified sites. Artists of this era represented in the exhibition include William Keith, Jules Tavernier, Edward Rufus Hill, Grace Carpenter Hudson, Charles Rollo Peters and Will Sparks.

The exhibition also includes the work of two prominent Bay Area watercolorists who were influenced by European Impressionism: Lorenzo P. Latimer and Percy Gray.

Maynard Dixon, The Man with the Hoe, 1916, ink wash and gouache on paper

The most recent image, Maynard Dixon’s Man With the Hoe, dated 1916, refers to Edwin Markham’s popular 1899 poem of the same name. The poem, written in Oakland when Markham was a teacher here, was itself inspired by a famous work by the French painter Millet.

The greater portion of California painting was based in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 19th century as a result of the establishment of numerous artist’s studios and the formation of the San Francisco Art Association. By the 1880s San Francisco enjoyed a reputation as the premier American art center west of the eastern seaboard. Some of California’s most respected painters from the 1890s and later were trained at the San Francisco Art Association’s School of Design, now the San Francisco Art Institute. These painters—as well as the school’s directors Norton Bush and Virgil Williams and instructors Juan B. Wandesforde and Thomas Hill—are represented in the exhibition.

Few early works survive from Southern California, probably because few artists settled there until after 1885, when the Santa Fe Railway opened an all-weather route via the Southwest between Chicago and Los Angeles.

Dr. C. Albert Shumate (1904-1998) has been called the dean of San Francisco historians. He was a native of San Francisco who devoted himself to researching, writing, and collecting books and art about the history of California. He began collecting California art in the 1930s, one of the first people to do so. In the 1960s he donated several paintings to the Oakland Museum, when the museum was just getting started. A prolific writer, he published 11 books on colorful figures and events in California history as well as numerous shorter works.

He served as a trustee and/or president of numerous California historical organizations, including the California Historical Society, Conference of California Historical Societies, San Francisco Westerners Corral, California Pioneer Society, Fort Point and Presidio Museum Association, San Francisco Hook & Ladder Society, San Francisco chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, California Genealogical Association, California Heritage Council, San Francisco Beautiful, E Clampus Vitus and San Francisco Westerners. He also served as President of the San Francisco Dermatological Society, Vice President of the San Francisco Art Commission and chair of several library organizations.

Harvey Jones, curator of the exhibition, gave a gallery talk and conducted a walkthrough of the exhibition on Sunday, July 15, 2001.

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