of aesthetic culture than exist in any other community so isolated, so exposed to frontier influences, and so youthful. First, it should be said that the term Art is used here in the sense which restricts it to drawing, painting, sculpture and engraving. That understood, let the reader take a brief retrospective glance. In 1835 the first house was built on the rough and sandy site of San Francisco. In 1848 the parent village of Yerba Buena, containing a mixed population of about eight hundred, donned the saintly name which has since become famous and felt the stimulating shock of the gold discovery. During the twenty years that have followed, the city has increased its population to 135,000; has leveled many rocky and sandy heights; has filled in and covered with warehouses two hundred and thirty acres of tide lands, extending the city frontage half a mile beyond the original beach; has created about two hundred millions of wealth; has exported a thousand millions of gold and silver, nearly all the product of California mines; has established manufactures whose annual product is valued at twenty-five millions, and has taken rank as the third American city for the importance of its foreign commerce. These "facts" are known to Mr. Gradgrind, and it must be confessed they justify the pride with which he repeats them; but what can be said of the city's taste for Art, of its devotion to the beautiful for its own sake, of its sympathy with the forms and sounds and colors by which the most exquisite genius of mankind has expressed its purest and sweetest and tenderest ideas, emotions and longings? Let us establish a slight claim to be linked with the world's aesthetic progress, if we would have its better opinion, which looks beyond the mere practicalities, or values them most as they conduce to finer results.
If the records of Art in San Francisco are meagre, and relate more to promise than to achievement, we can remember that New York, when it was over two hundred years old and had a population of nearly 300,000, could boast of little more, and has made most of its progress within the last fifteen years.
Strictly speaking there ave no records of Art in this city, and only one attempt has been made to write a connected memoir on the subject. In July, 1863, John S. Hittell, one of the most observing and useful literary men of the State, published in The Pacific Monthly—a periodical which succeeded the Hesperian—an article of nine pages, giving a sketchy account of the most notable pictures and artists then known in the city, but not entering into the antecedents of his topic. Anything like an historical account is only to be gathered from the unwritten recollections of a number of persons who have had more or less familiarity with Art and its votaries here since 1849. In that year the city was scarcely more than a collection of tents on the sandy slope running down to the crescent-shaped beach that has long since disappeared. The inhabitants were all moved by a keen hunger for sudden wealth in its grossest form. There were many designing arts, but no arts of design. There was no society, and there were no libraries nor collections of pictures, except those designated by Burns as "the Deil's pictur-books." In some of the Mission churches south of San Francisco were a few biblical or saintly paintings which had been introduced from Mexico or Spain, and some of these are reported to have been the work of good artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Artists there were, as well as philosophers, scientists and litterateurs, in the first crowd that rushed to these auriferous shores; but all were absorbed in gold-hunting. A few men, like Bayard Taylor, who came here partly to report what they saw as well
