Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/23

 catching their first delighted glimpse of the mountain slopes and valleys of El Dorado. The family is that of Captain Grayson, the portraits are from life, and the composition is characteristic. Without much merit as a piece of painting, it is yet natural and suggestive. Mr. Jewett has been chiefly known as a portrait painter, and has been steadily employed here in that capacity down to the present day. His most notable work in that line is a life size full length of John A. Sutter, which hangs in the Capitol at Sacramento, and for which the Legislature in 1855 appropriated $5,000. The Grayson picture is in the collection of the Mercantile Library of San Francisco. Gazing upon it and following its suggestions rather than criticising its execution, one can imagine the feelings of that pioneer family, who, after weeks of weary travel across the wide and desolate plains of the middle continent, and days of weary climbing up rocky steeps, through many dangers real or imaginary, have reached the Pisgah of their hopes, and are looking down upon the promised land lying in its still beauty like the sleeping Princess of the story, waiting but the kiss of Enterprise to spring into energetic life. There below them is not only the field for industry and enterprise, but a panorama of natural charms destined to inspire poets, to glow on the canvas of painters, and to take on the magic of human association and tradition. The piney slopes are musical with the gurgle of hidden waters tumbling from the rim of still lakes; the coniferous woods open like columned aisles; silver mists hide the wandering streams in abysmal cañons; purple ridges wall the bright sky in straight lines to left and right; below them imagination pictures the billowy foot-hills, tawny with dry stubble, and islanded with oaks of never-failing verdure; while still beneath and beyond, the broad valley of the Sacramento shimmers in its summer gold that spring will turn to a variegated parterre, and from its western verge rises the coast range, soft as cloud-land mountains, looking into the Pacific. Over this scene are spread those delicious tints of blue and purple and gold, those blending shades of violet, lilac and topaz, which give to the landscapes of California all the charm of fairy illusion. This is the Rasselas Valley of sober fact. Here beauty awaits the poet who shall praise and the limner who shall copy her manifold fascinations, though for some years she will wait in vain, or have for her votaries only those who come to look and learn.

Not quite first in time, but confessedly first in culture and ability, of all the early resident artists, was Charles Nahl, a native of Cassel, Germany, who belongs to a family of painters and sculptors, and who has had the thorough training of the best European schools. Before leaving Europe for America in 1849, he had acquired some reputation as a painter of historical and genre compositions. He has always been a careful student, and the elaborate drawings in detail which fill his portfolios attest the conscientious method by which he acquired his remarkable skill as a realistic painter. He has been in the steady practice of art in San Francisco for about eighteen years, devoted to it for its own sake always, though compelled for a long time to do much hack work. He is most versatile of all the artists who have resided here, being at home in portraiture, in still life, in genre, in fruit and flowers, and in object painting; equally facile and elaborate in sepia, in pencil, in crayon, in pen and ink, in water colors and oil; while he has also executed in fresco, engraved on copper, steel and wood, and has even invented a process of etching on glass with the aid of photography. He has been a fertile designer for various publications, and although in his most rapid work there is a mannerism which provokes criticism, no one has at all approached him as a popular delineator of