| Pacific Arcadia is a study of the imagery of the California Dream. Through an analysis of paintings, drawings, photographs and prints created from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, this paper examines the role of representation as a strategy of conquest, assimilation and development. The paper is divided into chapters which identify the predominant visual themes that were adopted by imagemakers who came to California after 1600. The first chapter, "Terrestrial Paradise," deals with seventeenth-century maps and the drawings made by European expeditionary artists during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and discusses the ways these images embodied the colonial programs of their makers. "The Golden Dream" covers the imagery of the Gold Rush and the ways in which pictures of "honest" and "industrious" miners promoted a favorable interpretation of the tumultuous "Days of '49." California's latent agricultural potential, and the desire of Anglo-American settlers in California during the 1860s and 1870s to align their state with the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, is the subject of another chapter, "Cornucopia of the World." The interaction between artists and California business interests, including the Southern Pacific Railroad, in the development of the California tourist industry is taken up in two chapters: "Spanish Arcadia" and "Rush for the Wilderness." The last chapter, "Urban Visions," examines nineteenth-century images of San Francisco in the context of American ideas about the city and and its role in the allocation of resources to the citizenry. The paper concludes with a discussion of representations of the earthquake of 1906 and the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. As part of its analysis of cultural networks in California, Pacific Arcadia also takes into account contemporary literature, including the writings of Spanish expedition leaders, Bret Harte, Mark Twain and Charles Lummis, in fostering the idea of California as the "Golden State."... |
