It started with a search to find the earliest picture of Mount Shasta.

From dusty and dimly lit storage cages eleven stories deep below Washington, DC, to illustrious libraries in Paris, gloomy rooms at Palo Alto’s most famous university and the basements of the Met Museum in New York City…Bill tracked down Mount Shasta’s earliest artworks. Possibly the most unusual was a massive 1870’s painting of the mountain adorning a wall in the stuffiest and most exclusive men’s club of LA.

The search ended when confirmation came that the earliest Mount Shasta original artwork is stored at a U.S. Navy museum, in fine condition after 180 years of obscurity.

The knowledge Bill gained along the way is fascinating. Mount Shasta has been a destination for artists for nearly two centuries, and is internationally known as one of America’s most important visual treasures.

On Nov. 17th, Bill Miesse shared his passion and knowledge of Mount Shasta’s art history with a wide array of 19th and 20th century mountain art, created by explorers, artists and scientists.  It’s a great detective story as well as a visual treat via the excellent Zoom interface.  The webinar was attended by many fans of the mountain, from Siskiyou County and afar (viewers from Alaska and from Vermont vied for the title of “most distant”).  The webinar was recorded and is available for your viewing pleasure on the SLT Youtube channel.

 

Resources:

  • Green, Tyler  Carleton Watkins: Making the West American   University of California Press, Berkeley CA, 2018   VIEW AT UC PRESS
  • LaPena, Frank  Frank LaPena_Thoughts on upcoming show at Crocker Museum Oct 19, 2019  https://vimeo.com/364882581   Online video, 2019
  • LaPena, Frank   The World is a Gift  Limestone Press, CA, 1987  Only 100 copies printed. Hard to find.
  • Miesse, William   The Significance of Mount Shasta as a Visual Resource in 19th and 20th Century California Art. 1989 Online as part of the ‘Mount Shasta Companion’ on College of the Siskiyous Library Mount Shasta Collection; temporarily the Companion is offline. The physical document available at College of the Siskiyous Library.
  • Miesse, William. and Robyn Peterson  Sudden and Solitary: Mount Shasta and its Artistic Legacy, 1841-2008. Heyday Books, Berkeley CA. 2008 VIEW AT GOOGLE BOOKS
  • Miesse, William  Mount Shasta: An Annotated Bibliography College of the Siskiyous, 1993. [online version:  http://www.siskiyous.edu/Library/shasta
  • Masson, Marcelle, editor. [Grant Towendolly] A Bag of Bones: The Wintu Myths of a Trinity River Indian. Naturegraph Publishers. Happy Camp, CA. 1966. VIEW AT NATUREGRAPH PUBLISHING

From Miesse’s classic book, Sudden and Solitary:  “more than 150 years of artwork by the many visionary artists, past and present, big and small, who have been inspired by Mount Shasta. The mountain’s grand beauty has called to a myriad of artists, from early California painters Albert Bierstadt and William Keith, to modern masters of photography such as Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Michael Kenna.”