PBA Galleries

Etching and drypoint panorama view of San Francisco. 18.5x95 cm (7¼x37½") plus margins, laid down on old backing board.

Finely etched view by the French artist Charles Meryon, created using a five-daguerrotype panorama by an unknown photographer. Meryon, who had served in the French Navy and cruised the Pacific before resigning to become an artist in Paris, but had evidently never seen San Francisco, was commissioned to create this panorama by the French banker and real estate magnate François Louis Alfred Pioche  who traveled regularly between his native Paris and his adopted home of San Francisco, where he had extensive property holdings. While much of the landscape was copied directly from the photographs, Meryon added a cartouche to the center foreground with allegorical figures of Abundance and Labor, as well as portrait medallions of Pioche and his partner Jules B. Bayerque. There were four states, at least, of the etching - we have not determined which state this is.