The gilded rush: Art patronage, industrial capital, and social authority in Victorian California

This study discusses the patronage of and institutional support for the visual arts in the late nineteenth century by bankers and industrialists in California, particularly the executives of the Central Pacific Railroad---Charles Crocker, Edwin Bryant Crocker, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford. By examining the social and institutional frameworks for art consumption and engaging in close readings of individual objects, this project demonstrates how art patronage, as part of a larger complex of social and cultural philanthropy, became a means of establishing social authority even while that authority was challenged locally, nationally and internationally. In short, collectors in California framed and legitimated their patronage in three primary ways: as a means of educating the working classes and elevating their tastes; as a commitment to and the preservation of a partisan account of local history; and, particularly with photography, as a contribution to the advancement of scientific inquiry. Yet at the same time, these same artworks precipitated divergent responses, exemplifying how acts of patronage and art collecting in California occurred in a contested socio-cultural arena. Dissenters and critics regularly challenged or negotiated the meanings imposed by these industrialists on their collections.;The first section, "Towards a Topography of Art Patronage in San Francisco," maps the philosophical and institutional terrain---as variously inhabited by patrons, supporters, and opponents---for the consumption, display, and theorization of art collections. Subsequent case study chapters examine individual or classes of artworks. The third chapter, "White Gold," addresses competing representations of the idealized white fraternity of the California Gold Rush that emerged in the 1870s. The fourth, "Missionary Work," scrutinizes the symbolic currency of the state's Spanish Mission Myth, with special emphasis on the cultural philanthropic and art collecting practices of women. The fifth, "Iron Horses," examines the conflicts over the significance of these early stop-motion photographs as debates over the nature of vision and the role of technologies of industrialization. The last, "The Pinnacles of Society," investigates the taste for landscape painting and photography in the 1870s alongside contemporaneous geologic and sociological theories.