Art and exploration in California, 1791-1827

Magazine Antiques, April, 1999 by Claire Perry

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Spain, France, England, and Russia sponsored around-the-world reconnaissance voyages to gather information about little-known regions of the globe. The sovereigns of Europe had bitten off great chunks of territory during the previous age of discovery, including North and South America, the West Indies, the South Pacific, and the Philippines. The period that followed was a time to consolidate the new holdings and begin the assimilation process through which remote colonies were converted into useful components of Old World empires.

The artists who accompanied expeditionary voyages played a critical role in appraising new real estate and satisfying the appetites of the monarchs and merchants they served for visual intelligence from remote dominions. The mandate of these artists was to observe and record anything that might be useful to their superiors and provide, in particular, information that could identify, out of the overwhelming number of regions ready to be put to use, those that might ultimately prove valuable to their European owners. Images made by expeditionary artists who traveled to California, at the distant edge of North America, certainly indicated that this remote land was worthy of more detailed scrutiny.

One of the earliest artists to travel to California was Jose Cardero, who sailed in 1789 with the Spanish expedition led by Captain Alessandro Malaspina (1754-1809). The purpose of the Malaspina voyage, one of the most extensive ever planned by Spain, was to gather scientific data about the topography, flora, fauna, and native populations of different regions around the world, with special attention to the Pacific Coast of North America. Cardero joined the expedition as first boatswain, but was soon enlisted as the ship's artist when the men selected previously proved unfit for the position. Accordingly, Cardero's drawings of California, in their precise definition of objects in space and their workmanlike execution, retain the mark of the navigator and the oarsman.

Despite Cardero's lack of formal training, his drawings demonstrate a keen sense of observation and a sensitivity to aesthetic nuance. India y Indio de Monterey [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED], the artist's portrayal of a group of native Californians, probably Esselen or Rumsen Costanoans from the area near Monterey, focuses the viewer's attention on the textures of the costume worn by the woman in the foreground. With a sailor's eye for sheets and rigging Cardero delineates the soft corrugations of her sea-otter cape, emphasizing the contrast of the fur with the smooth surface of a buckskin apron and the grassy stiffness of her braided tule skirt. The woman's friendly expression seems to invite closer inspection, leading the viewer's gaze to other tribespeople shown in the background. On the right, a native woman holding a handled basket seems to converse with a young man who looks out at the viewer. His nudity is accentuated by the thin strap that leads from the quiver on his right shoulder to his left flank, underscoring his nobly muscled torso and proud bearing. Cardero's drawing conveys the artists sympathy for his subjects, as well as his confidence in their worthiness as new members of the Spanish empire. The image substantiates the account of a Spanish navigator who visited California twenty years earlier, describing the natives of Monterey as people of "good disposition."(1)

Cardero was apparently content with his handiwork because he reproduced the same figures in a study of the mission established at Monterey in 1770, which moved to Carmel in 1771 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. The noble warrior reappears almost at the center of the composition, while the woman with the sea-otter stole stands on the right, holding an open basket. The courtyard around them communicates a sense of the ordered development of the colony. Fanning out in a large circle, clusters of Indian neophytes converse with their Spanish masters in attitudes that suggest cooperation and willingness. At the center of the circle is a mass of rough-hewn timber, symbolic of the natural wealth of the territory that has brought the two groups together.

The arrangement of the structures that define the courtyard helps to clarify the relationship between the Europeans and the California Indians. On the right, the long arm of the mission building embraces the distance, with the deep overhang of its roof providing comfortable shade below. Answering on the left, tidy rows of Indian huts, modest and small by comparison, complete the image of a happy symbiosis. Of course, the harmonious interactions pictured in the drawing refute the published accounts of other visitors, including that of the French explorer Jean Francois de Galaup, comte de La Perouse (1741-1788) who, after seeing Indian converts at the mission of Carmel in 1786, described "both men and women in irons, and others in stocks."(2) If Cardero, whose powers of observation were honed by years at sea, noticed anything that might support La Perouse's embarrassing report, he did not trouble his superiors with those details.