Golden Days

“Splendide Californie!” Splendid California indeed.

With this simple exhortation, Claudine Chalmers has crafted a work that transcends its original premise: the impressions of California by French artists from 1786 to 1900. This is not simply an account of the earliest French explorers to Spanish California, and the Gallic parade that followed through the serene, then shifting and ultimately tumultuous landscape of California in the 1800s.

Instead, there is a stunning balance among paintings, woodcuts, lithographs and sketches of an exquisite nature paired with judicious and juicy anecdotal accounts of those who created them. There is no Francophile pretense here, only the flesh and bone of those French people who made their way to the island of gold, the western Valhalla, seeking to get rich quick, to sketch an immortal moment in art or to roam free in a new world of infinite possibilities; all is rendered real. The drama of what the French encountered is captured, from elegant Californio dons mounted on magnificent silver-saddled steeds, to Mission scenes portraying the stripped-down military occupation that they actually were, to young Frenchmen spending the better half of a year on ships sailing to El Dorado, only to then journey for months into wilderness, where many died of hunger, disease, snakebite or the hostile arrows of the local inhabitants.

There are vainglorious ambitions here: making enough of a kill in the gold fields to buy this New World, three-quarters the size of France itself, or setting up a new Napoleonic empire, or carving out kingdoms of opulence such as the Old World had never dreamed. But there are also the gold nuggets of ordinary people in extraordinary times, artistic interpreters flush with the discovery of fresh landscape as yet unpolished by the eyes of the masses, beckoning to be revealed in paint, pen, pencil and charcoal, transformed to art.

What spirals out from the center of this enterprise is the sense of the vast canvas of early California, and the overriding confluence of cultures and races that spilled across that canvas, anticipating the California now inherited: freeways, smog, urbanization and diminution of natural space. But for a moment, while turning the pages of this book and traversing the visuals and stories of California’s lost world, the dream of the possible exists, history is glimpsed, grandness is embraced, and the mundane celebrated.

One wants to linger over all of the narrative illustrations: the swiftly executed watercolor of a Monarch butterfly; the minimal but dense sensibility of an 1851 watercolor of a brick-facade San Francisco cityscape that Edward Hopper surely must have studied; the hallucinogenic and giddy tilt of an 1865 lithograph of San Francisco after a big shake, titled “Earth Quakey Times”; or the light-up-the-night sky 1880 lithograph of “A Holiday in Chinatown”; or the spooky and mythological redolent 1881 scene in towering redwoods aptly tagged “The Cremation of Care.”

So many jewels here, displayed with adroit panache in a book handsomely crafted by California’s Yolla Bolly Press. The book itself, which was recently awarded a silver medal by the Commonwealth Club of California for notable contribution to publishing, is a work of art, rare and expensive, with a limited-edition printing of 450 copies. The most a reader can hope to do is visit this beauty of a creation at one of the few libraries prescient enough to have secured a copy for posterity. Another reasonably priced edition should be published so that adventurous explorers of California art and history can roar down the breathtaking visual and textual river that this book offers.

In the end, however, is left the reverberating memory of images both intimate and monumental, the lavender light-infused sweep of Santa Monica Beach in all its early holiday glory, the haughty peak of Mt. Tamalpias before it was chained by suburbia.

And then there is the revelation of Pauline Aimee Schoenmakers. Schoenmakers created more than 100 artworks in California between 1889 and 1899, while she was mostly in her 20s. When she had her first child, she laid down her paintbrush; her life as a painter came to an abrupt stop.

Of her works, the one that particularly inspires is “Chinese Woman Sitting in Chair,” the portrait of a young Chinese woman reading from an open book. It is a vision of contemplative beauty and intelligence, infused with subdued mystery, like California herself in one of her many guises, simply transporting.