Artful Players: Artistic Life in Early San Francisco
This is a light-hearted, humorous account of the "Barbary Coast's" art world from the Gold Rush years up to the great earthquake and fire that almost completely leveled the young city in 1906. Although San Francisco was then a provincial backwater, it was a backwater of a truly exceptional sort. The Golden Gate was the principal portal for arriving goods and people from East Asia, and the city's wild, mercenary infancy established a well-deserved reputation as a tenuous enclave of civilization beyond the Western wilderness. Hjalmarson writes of how San Francisco's setting attracted creative people from all over the world, and because she has such good material to work with it's an entertaining story of a small, pretentious, but irrepressibly lively arts community. Many famous artists worked in Northern California during the 1800s, most notably Alfred Bierstadt, George Inness and William Keith. More useful certainly is the attention Hjalmarson pays to lesser-known names and the 25-page appendix she includes, with capsule biographies of these painters and sculptors. Highly recommended for West Coast libraries.ADouglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., CACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.