California paintings.(Current and coming)(Artists at Continent's End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875-1907)

Around the turn of the twentieth century, artists, photographers, writers, and other creative types found remote, inexpensive, and beautiful places to live in each other's company, sharing ideas and good times. These were for the most part free-spirited individuals who welcomed spending the summer in the country, painting alone or with a group of students. The towns of California were mostly rustic backwaters in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, which was exactly the quality that attracted these various creative people. By August 25, 1901, a critic for the San Francisco Call could write: "Monterey is being immortalized.... Here in this little Venice of America can be found a genuine colony of artists. Everywhere, scattered along the road from Del Monte to Pacific Grove, in the fields and along the shore, one can see easels, and under the huge umbrellas sunbonneted and airy-gowned figures sit oblivious to all except the particular rock or tree or patch of sky that is trying to evade their brush."

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The evolution of Monterey, including the nearby towns of Pacific Grove and later Carmel, as an art colony, and the artists and the few photographers who spent time there are the subject of an exhibition on view at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento until May 21. The show is entitled Artists at Continent's End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875-1907, and includes some seventy-five paintings, works on paper, and photographs. The show travels to three other museums in California over the course of the next year.

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The first artist to discover this singular landscape was the influential French emigre Jules Tavernier, who traveled to the Monterey Peninsula in 1875. He and those who came after him were essentially San Francisco painters who wanted a change of scenery and an escape from their studios. In San Francisco, the Art Association and the Bohemian Club had been founded in 1871 and 1872, respectively, and became two of the most important gathering places for local artists, most of whom had studied or spent time in Europe and kept abreast of the latest trends in the art world.

The landscape of the Monterey Peninsula had features that were not to be found elsewhere: a rocky coastline, beaches, the sea, and windswept gnarled cypress trees, all frequently blanketed in fog. The architecture of the region was noted for its centuries-old adobe mission churches and other Spanish-influenced structures, some reduced to haunting ruins.

The first wave of ...