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The City of San Francisco. Birds Eye View From the Bay Looking South-West.
New York, Currier & Ives, 1878. Chromolithograph, 21.875” x 32.75” plus margins. CONDITION: Very good, margins expertly extended, faint toning. A splendid large-folio view of San Francisco as seen from an imaginary elevated vantage point over San Francisco Bay, showing the city as it appeared after three decades of extraordinary growth beginning with the Gold Rush in 1849. By the 1870s San Francisco was not only the most important city in the West, it was also the most important port on the West Coast. Accordingly, this view shows the waters around the city replete with all manner of vessels going to and fro, suggesting a high volume of commercial activity. The waterfront, built on a “vast amount of fill that was deposited in Yerba Buena Cove,” (Reps) is similarly busy, with numerous piers and docked ships. The Oakland Ferry, belching black smoke, awaits at the foot of the city’s main thoroughfare, Market Street, which is enlivened by a great number of horse-drawn vehicles and pedestrians. A multitude of buildings and other subjects of interest are identified in the title margin. Among those in the foreground and middleground are the post office & custom house, a sugar refinery, the marine hospital, the Palace Hotel, the residences of Governor Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins (two of the big four behind the Central Pacific Railroad), the Selby shot tower, the U.S. Mint, and many others. Visible in the distance are Golden Gate Park, Cliff House, the Agricultural Park & Race Course, and so on. The line of the Southern Pacific and the C.P.R.R. and associated depots and buildings appear along the eastern side of the city. Like photographer Edweard Muybridge’s remarkable 360-degree panoramas of San Francisco made in 1877 and 1878, this view reveals the unprecedented phenomenon of a major American city built up almost overnight, its growth spurred not only by the gold rush but also by the discovery of the Comstock Lode and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. Charles Richard Parsons (1844–1920) was the son of artist Charles Parsons who emigrated from England to New York in the 1840s and provided drawings of marine and other subjects for numerous lithographs published by Endicott and Currier & Ives. Following a period of apprenticeship with his father, Charles Richard Parsons took a very similar path. In addition to the present view of San Francisco, Parsons drew several other important bird’s eye views for Currier & Ives. These include Washington, D.C. (1880), Baltimore (1880), and Brooklyn, New York (1879). Additionally, Parsons worked in conjunction with Lyman Atwater to create views of New York and Brooklyn (1877), Chicago (1874 and 1893), Boston (1873), St. Louis (1874) and other cities. Reps describes two states of the Parsons view of San Francisco. The example offered here is State I, before the addition of “B. McQuillan…Agent for the Pacific Coast” below the title. A stunning view of the great western metropolis of the nineteenth century. REFERENCES: LC Panoramic Maps, 38; Reps, Views and Viewmakers 333; Reps, Cities on Stone, p. 97; Reps, Bird’s Eye Views, pp. 102, 104 (illus.); Baird, J.A. Historic Lithographs of San Francisco, 58a; Peters, H.T. California On Stone, p. 109.
Item #8453
Price: $15,000.00
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