Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915 - Softcover

To accompany an exhibit opening in April 1999 at Stanford University's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, this catalogue describes how images dating from the arrival of the 16th-century Spanish explorers have been used to cultivate the notion of the "California dream." Selected paintings, maps, and printed ephemera portray the state as a Pacific paradise where economic bliss is easily attainable. Together with the Gold Rush in 1848, the author states, the idealization of California had contributed to the tripling of the population by the turn of the century, and affects popular notions today of the "Golden State."

Claire Perry is curator of American art at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. She specializes in the cultural history of nineteenth-century America.