California: This Golden Land of Promise
February 7 – May 3, 2002

John Gamble, Santa Barbara Landscape, from the Irvine Collection

California: This Golden Land consisted of thirty-nine paintings on loan from the Irvine Museum and two private collections. The exhibition represented the flowering of a regional school of painting from the 1860s to the 1920sm and featured works that are both naturalistic and utopian in intention and execution. The exhibition included the work of such artists as William Coulter, Edwin Deakin, John Gamble, Percy Gray, William Hahn, Thomas Hill, Clay Hobarty, Charles Rollo Peters, Granville Redmond, and William Wendt, among others. A highlight of the exhibition was a series of ten paintings depicting the California missions, as seen through the painters' eyes as New World equivalents to the classical ruins of ancient Greece and Rome.