Art and exploration in California, 1791-1827

Magazine Antiques, April, 1999 by Claire Perry

A traveling exhibition entitled Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915 will be on view at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University in Stanford, California, from April 21 to June 27. Future showings will be listed in Calendar. Some 250 paintings, drawings, maps, prints, photographs, advertisements, and book illustrations are included in the show, which was organized by Claire Perry, who also wrote the accompanying book of the same title as the exhibition. The exhibition is sponsored by the Ford Motor Company.

1 Miguel Costanso, an engineer with the Portola Expedition of 1768, quoted in Monterey in 1786: Life in a California Mission: The Journals of Jean-Francois de La Perouse, ed. Malcolm Margolin (Heyday Books, Berkeley, California, 1989), p. 21.

2 Quoted ibid., p. 81.

3 Voyage pittoresque autour du Monde (Paris, 1822), pp. iii-iv.

4 Choris's account is quoted in Otto von Kotzebue's Voyage of Discovery into the South-Sea and Beering's Straits..., vol. 3 (London, 1821), p. 41.

5 Voyage pittoresque autour du Monde, p. 6.

6 Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's Strait... (London, 1831), p. 57.

7 Walton Bean and James J. Rawls, California: An Interpretive History, 5th ed. (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1988), p. 51.

8 Narrative of a Voyage, p. 41.

9 Ibid., p. 20.

10 Ibid.

CLAIRE PERRY is the curator of American art at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University in Stanford, California.