Autograph Letter Signed (in pencil). Chestnut St., Room No. 3, over Earle’s Picture Gallery, [Philadelphia, Pa.], Sept. 29, 1852. 1pg.+ stampless address leaf. To [William] Russell Smith, Milltown [Pennsylvania].
“Dear friend, You will be surprised to see me dating from here – on the day on which you supposed I was to leave Liverpool. But you know in these days of ‘Telegraph wires’ what wonderful things can be done – and if you’ll promise to keep the secret till I get out the patent – I’ll tell you, when you can find time to drop in, how I managed. I don’t know whether you are yet settled out at your cottage Home – but when you do get there…request you to ‘call’ the first time you’re in town and tell me how you enjoyed your homeward trip …”
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and studying art in Europe, McIlvaine (1813-1867), while working for his merchant father in Philadelphia, began exhibiting paintings of European landscapes. He thus became friends with Scottish-born William Thompson Russell Smith, ten years his senior, who was already well-established as a painter of panoramic landscapes and theatrical scenes. In 1849, McIlvaine sailed "around the horn" to San Francisco. Arriving on June 1, he went directly to the gold fields, where, as historian Robert Cleland later remarked, he “devoted more time to his sketch book than to the 'pick, pan, or shovel'". After five months in California, he began the trip home, traveling overland across Mexico, then sailing back to Philadelphia, where, in early 1850, he published “Sketches Of Scenery And Notes Of Personal Adventure In California And Mexico”, a book of only 44 pages, featuring 16 full-page lithographic plates from his original drawings. He then recruited Russell Smith to paint a “grand-scale panorama” based on his sketches, which was displayed in Philadelphia and Baltimore – one of many California panoramas on public view, but possibly the first based on the work of an artist who, as a Forty-Niner, had seen the gold country firsthand. While Smith continued to gain artistic renown for watercolors he painted at his country studio in Milltown, McIlvaine’s work was all but forgotten. Not until his Gold Rush sketch book was reproduced in a 1951 by the Grabhorn Press did collectors begin to avidly seek the original edition – a rarity which now brings more than $7000 at auction. The Library Congress noted that the book was one of only 14 Gold Rush "narratives of personal experience” published “while the Gold Rush was still in progress", More importantly, it was the only one to feature art rather than prose. McIlvaine may thus be considered the first published American artist of the California Gold Rush, and this letter to Smith, who brought his work to the attention of the Eastern public, makes this letter a choice historical association.