CIRCA 1850

This charming untitled painting depicts Gold Rush San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Cove—site of today’s Financial District—and Telegraph Hill. It is reproduced here courtesy of the Reid W. Dennis Collection. The earliest known reference to this unsigned work is in an auction catalog from New York’s American Art Association, dated May 3­4, 1916: “Original Oil Painting on Whatman paper [there are no watermarks to confirm this], by Fred Tobin, 1850. Height, 13½ inches; width, 19¼ inches. View of San Francisco taken from the Southern Extremity of the town, called Rincont Point [Rincon Point was near Harrison and Front streets], looking towards the town, with Telegraph Hill in Centre background, showing idle shipping in harbor [mud flats kept ships far offshore; many were abandoned by their fortune-seeking crews]. Rare contemporary view of San Francisco in the early mining days, taken on the spot. The following statement was penciled on the back of one of the old frames from which this and the following four paintings were taken [a total of seven are known today],—'Painted by Fred Tobin, 1850,—who had recently been Secretary to the Society of Foreign Artists.'" Regrettably, little else is known about this enigmatic artist. As Oscar Wilde writes of another painter in The Picture of Dorian Gray, "It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco."

More about Yerba Buena Cove and Telegraph Hill

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