Danish landscape painter Joachim Ferdinand Richardt (1819–1895) arrived in San Francisco in the winter of 1874–75. Already known for his masterful paintings of Niagara Falls, he contributed a painting by that name to the Mechanics’ Institute of San Francisco’s Tenth Industrial Exhibition the following summer. It is unknown when Richardt began working on San Francisco at Night from Telegraph Hill. It is likely that he completed it toward the end of San Francisco’s—and, incidentally, America’s—centennial year. The Daily Alta California’s enthusiastic review of the enormous painting was published on November 22, 1876. By that time, construction of the Baldwin Hotel at Market and Powell (where the Flood Building stands today) was well under way, in preparation for its grand opening on March 5, 1877. The colossal dome of E. J. “Lucky” Baldwin’s not-so-lucky hotel (it burned in 1898) is visible in Richardt’s painting near the chimneys of the U.S. Branch Mint.

Telegraph Hill’s panoramic vistas were also appreciated by two of San Francisco’s self-described “landscape photographers,” Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916), whose stereo views may have informed Richardt’s art. Both photographers possessed 3-D cameras, each equipped with a pair of lenses mounted 2½ "–3" apart—about or a bit more than the distance between the pupils of one’s eyes. The pair of pictures they took represented two points of view of the same scene, one as it would have been seen by the left eye and the other as it would have been seen by the right. They were mounted side by side on a 3½ " x 7" card, for viewing through a stereoscope, from the Greek words for “solid” and “to look at.” In the stereoscope, the left picture was visible only to the left eye, and the right picture only to the right. As if by magic, the pair of 2-D pictures—known as a stereograph or, more commonly, a stereo view—coalesced into one 3-D image, “a surprise,” according to Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), “such as no painting ever produced.”

Eadweard Muybridge is best known for his photographic studies of animals in motion and his contributions to the development of the motion picture. Long before Richardt arrived in San Francisco, Muybridge—as “Helios’ Flying Studio”—created a series of “moonlight effect” stereo views, many of which were more “effect” than “moonlight.” Using underexposed “day” for “night,” composite images, and moon-shaped “holes” in the negatives, Muybridge was able to effectively simulate a photographically elusive lunar reality. Stereoscopic sleight of hand notwithstanding, the similarity of Richardt’s moonlit panorama to Muybridge’s compelling nocturnal imagery is astonishing.

Carleton Watkins is best known for his pioneering mammoth-plate photographs of Yosemite. This stereo view is part 13 of his 20-part stereoscopic panorama of San Francisco from Telegraph Hill. Many of the homes in the foreground also appear in Richardt’s painting. The most prominent landmarks are the U.S. Marine Hospital at Rincon Point, which was severely damaged in the 1868 earthquake, and Mayor Thomas H. Selby’s imposing shot tower at First and Howard, consumed by fire on the afternoon of April 18, 1906.