Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Visual Materials
Visual Materials
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Image not available
Visual Materials
There are four self-portraits of photographer James A. Clayton, who operated a gallery in San Jose from 1856 to 1870.
photCL 581
Image not available
Visual Materials
Includes portraits by prominent photographers Carleton Watkins, Isaiah W. Taber, and the Dore Gallery. There are two portraits of babies in the same large seashell; one has the imprint of Taber, the other of Watkins. Possibly Taber put his name on Watkins' photograph; Taber purchased Watkins' negatives following Watkins' bankruptcy. Other portraits of note are: men in traditional Scottish clothing with kilts; individual portraits of African American women; Chinese Americans; and a white woman posing in traditional Chinese clothing and hairstyle.
photCL 581
Image not available
Visual Materials
One portrait of a Chinese man; one soldier in uniform.
photCL 581
Image not available
Visual Materials
One portrait of a woman holding a mask over her face (Nevada City); one man in military uniform wearing a button that says "Cal." (Oakland); a group portrait of five cowboys (Oroville); two portraits of men with bicycles (Oroville).
photCL 581
Image not available
Visual Materials
One portrait of a nun wearing a habit, holding a cross (Grass Valley); one postmortem photograph of a baby (Marysville).
photCL 581
Image not available
Visual Materials
A collection of approximately 7,000 cartes-de-visite and cabinet photographs, almost entirely portraits of ordinary people in the American West, photographed between approximately 1860 and 1910. The photographs represent the work of thousands of commercial photographers operating in every state west of the Mississippi, plus Wisconsin, which the collector considered a western state given its frontier role in the migration of photographers from the East to West. The collection includes 23 states and territories, including Hawaii, and a few portraits from British Columbia and Western Canada. There are a relatively small number of photographs from Alaska (1) and Arizona (6), not due to scarcity, but because those parts of the collection were previously dispersed. Portraits taken in California make up about half of the collection, representing established photographers in big cities like San Francisco and Sacramento, as well as lesser-known photographers in sparsely populated mountain towns. The people of the frontier and post-frontier West posing in the portraits are mostly unidentified, though some images do have handwritten names and dates. The majority of people pictured are white, with a relatively small number of portraits of African American, Chinese, Latino, and Indigenous persons. Sitters are of all ages, seen in individual poses or in family groups, in various styles of clothing, hair, jewelry, props, and furniture. Images include soldiers, wedding portraits, mothers with babies, children, frontiersmen, workers with tools, dogs, and occasional outdoor images of buildings or people. This collection was amassed over 35 years and became the primary source material for Mautz's seminal reference work Biographies of Western Photographers (1997). The thousands of imprints, some elaborately illustrated, include the names of several female photographers, such as: Fannie Hoyt, Salt Lake City, Utah; Mrs. E. W. (Eliza) Withington, Ione City, California; and Mrs. C. Klostermann, Eureka, California.
photCL 581