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Honnold Library Record: Drawings and Photographs of Edward Vischer
From the Honnold Library Record, Volume 3, Number 2. Summer 1960:
The Drawings and Photographs of Edward VischerEdward Vischer, one of whose crayon drawings is reproduced above, was a native of Regensberg, Germany. As a young man of 19 he emigrated to Mexico, where he was one of the industrious Germans who had connections with or were employed by the powerful Mexican commercial house of Heinrich Virmond. In the employ of Virmond, or other German-Latin American companies, he acted as supercargo on many trading voyages to west-coast ports of the Americas and to the Orient. He lived for fourteen years at Acapulco, put in at Mazatlan a number of times, and once at Valparaiso, Chile, had as a house guest a promising young member of a British scientific expedition, Charles Darwin.
In 1842, he became interested in California. "The isolated location of California," he explained, "alone is sufficient to stimulate curiosity. Therefore I accepted with pleasure Mr. Virmond's proposal to take a trip there for the purpose of inspecting his business." It was in this way that Vischer first came to know our remote region. He anchored at Monterey, which he found homelike and prettily built. He made an excursion northwest to "the port of Yerba Buena, a town of about a dozen houses." Santa Barbara he found to be a friendly city with an atmosphere of pious individualism. Continuing down the coast, he visited the southern capital, Los Angeles, where he was particularly struck by the clear, brisk atmosphere.
On this visit he fell in love with California; at the time of the Gold Rush, he gladly returned to San Francisco, where he was active in currency exchange operations, acted as agent for German-Mexican firms, as marine forwarding agent, as real estate agent, and as a mortgage banker.
At about the age of 50, Vischer became intensely interested in sketching and painting. He combined with these interests a skill in photography. It was his practice to make rapid sketches on the spot of scenes which interested him, the big trees, the ruins of Missions, or mining operations, and later to work up these sketches in water colour, pencil, pen or crayon. Subsequently he reproduced his drawings, first by lithography and later by photography. Using these techniques, Vischer published portfolios of drawings, The Mammoth Tree Grove (1862), The Washoe Mining Region (1862), Pictorial of California Landscape (1870), and Missions of Upper California (1872). A generous donor, Mrs. Frederick Hellman, has presented all these portfolios to the Library, together with a number of photographs and drawings which were never published.
From the materials presented by Mrs. Hellman, it is now possible to extend our knowledge of Vischer bibliography, as well as our understanding of his techniques as an artist.
The materials mentioned here are physically located in Special Collections. For more information, contact Special Collections.
A significant and growing proportion of these materials are also available online in the CCDL. You can find more by visiting the Visher collection home page. You can also browse items in the Vischer collection. Or, to view all collections in the CCDL visit the collections page.
What is the Honnold Library Record?
The Honnold Library Record, published from 1958 until 1975, was the publication of the Honnold Library Society, the friends of the library group, founded in 1954. All the issues of the Honnold Library Record are available online in the CCDL in the Honnold Library Record Collection.
— michael | April 17, 2007 05:12 PM | The more you know
