(San Francisco) — Henry Firks | A rare view of the the Golden City

(San Francisco) — Henry Firks

San Francisco 1849. [No place: circa 1880]

Single sheet (460 x 857 mm). Tintstone lithograph with additional hand-coloring; areas of light toning.

A rare and important early view of San Francisco—“one of the best-known early San Francisco views” (Peters). This is the seventh recorded state, without imprint, and with fifty-two numbered references.

Drawn by Henry Firks, a painter and lithographer active in mid-nineteenth-century California, the panorama captures the city just before its explosive transformation during the Gold Rush. It presents a detailed, sweeping view across the bay toward Telegraph Hill, with the new street grid, dense maritime activity, and Yerba Buena Island visible to the right. The Pacific entrance—soon to be known as the Golden Gate—frames the far edge of the harbor.

As Deák notes, Firks’s composition became the visual archetype for later San Francisco cityscapes, showing “the main features of the newly laid-out town: its favorable location on a wide bay; the hilly terrain affording lookout points; the low commercial structures lining the shore; the residential buildings of various make, some substantial, most not.”

REFERENCES:

Baird & Evans, Historic Lithographs of San Francisco (1972) 8g; California on Stone pp. 120-121; Deák, Picturing America 584; cf. Reps, Views and Viewmakers 242; Who Was Who in American Art (Madison, Ct.: Sound View Press, 1999) I: 1124