19th century AD

Point Bonita is a conscientious transcription of a real scene, looking north across the entrance to San Francisco harbor (the Golden Gate) from the San Francisco side toward Mann County with its Point Bonita lighthouse in the distance. But the scene is treated in such a way that it immediately evokes an emotional response from the viewer that no photographic inventory of physical facts could ever do. The interpretive element here is subtle, obviously too subtle for the writer in The Californian. A critic in The Argonaut, reviewing another Yelland coastal view, came close to verbalizing the charm of this kind of painting: "[The painting] is at once a perfectly accurate and very poetic statement of fact. It is a subtile and refined interweaving of the literal rendering of rocks, sky and water, with the romance, the essence of it." [11] The realism, in other words, makes the poetry--the harmonious blending of tones--more credible.

Although Yelland was occasionally derided as a plodding copyist of nature, he took a different view of his approach to art. He once told an interviewer that art "is not an imitation of nature, so much as the expression of one's own feeling. If you haven't any feeling, so much the worse for you and your art." [12] Yelland's emotions find an almost perfect visual outlet in San Francisco from Goat Island (P1. XVII) of 1881. Here the point of view is from an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay looking due west toward the Pacific Ocean. The considerable realism includes the high-rise towers of the Selby Shot Tower and Temple Emanuel in the city depicted in the distance at the left. But the realistic touches merely give credibility to the sumptuous treatment of the light. Tranquility, repose, rest from labor--all these qualities that we associate with the end of the day are present. Even the commuter ferryboat, a pedestrian sight at the time the painting was done, evokes emotions connected with going home to rest.

If Yelland was the leading luminist painter in San Francisco, other landscape artists periodically produced excellent work in this style. Charles Dormon Robinson was foremost among them. He received his first art lessons from Charles Christian Nahl (1818-1878) as a child in San Francisco, and as a teenager he studied in the East with, among others, William Bradford (1823-1893) and George Inness (1825-1894). He returned to San Francisco in 1874 and began to exhibit the marine paintings of San Francisco Bay that established his reputation. In 1885, the year before he painted Looking across the Golden Gate (P1. XVI), the San Francisco Chronicle noted of another such scene: "Robinson has struck a happy vein in his latest marine--the familiar 'Golden Gate.' There is a vim and dash in the treatment of waves and foam, the sky effects are very clever, and there is a good feeling along the shore." [13] The sky effects in the painting shown here are particularly interesting, with the wisps of fog set against high cirru s clouds, giving the sky a rare animation. Also notable is the cool palette of blue, gray, and green, evoking the fresh feeling of a typical day by the bay.