Alfred Robinson and Ferdinand Deppe: The Perfect Mission

A veteran of the Napoleonic wars, Ferdinand Deppe had served King Frederich Wilhelm III of Prussia at the Charlottenburg Palace Garden between 1810 and 1824.¹⁸ In his later travels, the naturalist collected thousands of cultural and horticultural artifacts in Mexico and Alta California. Wilhelm III purchased Deppe’s collection of taxidermic animals, insects, clothing, baskets, and coins to share with the public. He created the first public museums in Berlin intending to “encourage loyalty to the state in an age of revolutionary upheaval.”¹⁹ In 1829, Ferdinand Deppe became an Alta California hide and tallow merchant in order to finance his collections as a naturalist in the service of Prussian monarchy.²⁰

Representing a different kind of empire, the East Coast firm of Bryant & Sturgis sent Alfred Robinson to Alta California to represent them in the hide and tallow trade.²¹ Bryant & Sturgis was one branch of a powerful group of companies connected by family ties sometimes called the “Boston Concern.” In addition to Alta California, its globe-spanning trade network included posts in such places as Ottoman Smyrna, Liverpool, Manila, Canton, Valparaíso, Callao, and the Sandwich Islands.²² Historian Yvette Saavedra discusses William Hartnell and McCullough & Hartnell’s three-year monopoly trade arrangement with the Alta California Missions, ending in 1826. Alfred Robinson’s company, Bryant & Sturgis, displaced McCullough & Hartnell when mission priests realized that the American merchants paid higher prices for their hides and tallow.²³

Deppe and Robinson arrived in Alta California at a tumultuous time. The status of its twenty-one missions had been uncertain since Mexico won its independence from Spain eight years earlier, in 1821. Advocates of secularization spoke in the language of republicanism and individual freedom and argued that missions should be discharged from both their landowning monopoly and control over Indian communities and their labor. They were opposed to aristocracy, feudalism, and hierarchical status based on birth. Robinson and Deppe opposed secularization largely because of its potential to impede their trading operations. Other opponents of secularization derided it as anti-church and characterized it as confiscation of lands and goods the missionaries held in trust for the benefit of Native Americans attached to the missions. In theory, missionaries intended to establish the missions, transforming the Native Californians into Catholics as well as gente de razon capable of running mission industries on their own. After ten years, the theory went, Native peoples would be ready to assume control of mission lands and assets, the missionaries would turn their churches over to secular priests, and they would seek new populations supposedly in need of salvation. None of Alta California’s twenty-one missions achieved voluntary secularization.²⁴

The debate over secularization complicated Mexico’s efforts to govern Alta California. On January 6, 1831, the province’s first governor, José María de Echeandía, issued a decree ending Franciscan control of the missions. As he had since his appointment as governor in 1825, Echeandía echoed the arguments of many liberal Californios that mission lands and goods should be distributed among settlers and to Indians then living at the missions. Historian Rosaura Sánchez adds that, while these Californios favored individual liberty and private property for themselves, they did not support popular sovereignty or egalitarianism. They valued a form of “aristocratic liberalism” that benefited their own interests, a system predicated on exploitation of Indigenous peoples.²⁵ Contemporary scholars view the liberal Californios’ support for secularization as self-serving. Historian Yvette Saavedra explains that liberal Californios continually critiqued mission control of land because it reflected their “desires to take, redistribute, and privatize mission lands.”²⁶ Historian Louise Pubols discusses the generational conflict that undergirded the secularization debate. She explains that the younger Californios were interested in becoming landholders themselves, something that would have been impossible without secularization.

Changes in Mexico City soon dashed the hopes of pro-secularists. A more conservative government ousted Echeandía and replaced him with General Manuel Victoria, who took over as governor of Alta California on January 31, 1831. Californio José de la Guerra and the missionaries convinced Victoria to halt secularization, a move that, according to historian Emmanuelle Pérez-Tisserant, protected the power and prosperity of the missionaries as well as de la Guerra.²⁷ In addition to his role as síndico (accountant) for the missions, de la Guerra was one of Robinson’s key trade partners as well as his future father-in-law.²⁸ Exulted Robinson: “As soon as [Victoria] received the command from Echeandía, his first step was to counteract the ruinous effects of the imprudence of his predecessor, and to restore the Missions to their former state.”²⁹ In a letter to his Boston firm, Bryant & Sturgis, Robinson shared his relief that Governor Victoria had halted secularization, ensuring that the agent’s hide and tallow trade would continue as before. As Robinson summarized on October 29, 1831:

Robinson and Deppe centered the mission and its surrounding environment as perfect. Their idealized images recorded their opposition to secularization. Their allusion to the beauty of Spanish architecture, orderliness of mission enterprises, and lushness of mission settings suggested that the missions had succeeded in bringing the benefits of (supposedly superior) European culture to California. Their art spoke to their assumption of progress, the idea that society improves in a linear trajectory from one era to the next.

In his “View of the Mission of St. Gabriel” (Figure 1), for example, Robinson’s mission is clean and tidily symmetrical. All seven people in Robinson’s drawing are men in Western dress; their small scale in relation to the buildings emphasizes the grandness of the church, which dominates the painting’s central ground. Two pairs of Indigenous kiiy (structures) centered in the foreground are the only evidence of the Tongva neophyte community. Dwarfed by mission buildings, the empty structures imply a negligible Tongva population. In fact, the neophyte population at Mission San Gabriel was at least one thousand in the early 1830s when Robinson first created his sketch.³¹

Robinson gives no hint of Native discontent or suffering, instead rendering Indians invisible, suggesting that they were inconsequential to the mission project. This image is consistent with Robinson’s stance on secularization, his preoccupation with trade, and his lack of sympathy for Native Californians. Robinson’s idealized mission is architecture without Indians. At the same time, the image suggests the region’s compatibility with Anglo-American settlement. The cluster of homes in the front of Mission San Gabriel resembles a thriving New England town, the wooden fence demarcating private property lines. As historian Patricia Seed explains:

In his later reminiscences, Robinson again emphasized the missions’ economic value. He decried secularization’s commercial disruptions, which left Mission San Gabriel’s “eighty to over a hundred thousand head of cattle” to possibly fend for themselves. The mission’s cattle had “no advantage…beyond the value of their hides and tallow” but, without Native labor, “thousands of dollars are yearly left to perish on the field.” For Robinson, this was a tragedy: Franciscan friars and foreign merchants like himself had created prosperity for Alta California; without them, “dollars…perish on the field.”³³

Ferdinand Deppe’s painting of Mission San Gabriel (Figure 2) echoes these themes. This is not surprising, as art historian Nancy Dustin Wall Moure postulates: Deppe likely borrowed Robinson’s “foreground figures,” a strategy “commonly used by artists to give a composition scale and to show spatial depth,” after seeing “engravings in books or works by fellow California artists such as Alfred Robinson.”³⁴

Like Robinson’s image, the painting centers the church in the landscape. Unlike Robinson, Deppe included members of the Tongva in his composition, though in symbolically condescending ways. For example, in the right foreground, a naked Tongva child crawls next to a dog. A Tongva man in Indigenous dress with arms crossed speaks to the mayordomo (manager of mission livestock and grounds). Just beyond them, two Tongva men in Indigenous dress face the church in respectful prayer, one standing and one kneeling by a horse. Immediately before the church a large group of neophyte men, women, and children stand in a circle, perhaps celebrating a feast day.

In the lower right foreground, Deppe adds a Tongva family lounging before a solitary kiiy. Bathed in light and dressed in red to draw the viewer’s eye, the figures clad in European-style dress suggest the mission’s ostensible success, both in converting the Tongva to Catholicism and in assimilating them to Hispanic culture.³⁵ Perhaps Deppe meant to suggest that the family wore imported goods, secured through the hide and tallow trade, or that they produced the clothing themselves, using locally produced textiles and imported dyes (the women’s red skirts and the suits of the two boys could have been made from Mexican cochineal dye or the cheaper brazilwood).³⁶

Deppe places a hide and tallow merchant in the foreground, distinguishing him by his blue jacket and white pants. His dress approximates historian Samuel Eliot Morison’s description of the New England “merchant-captain” of the 1830s, clothed in “a navy-blue pea jacket or watch-coat” to enjoy “shore leave,” with “a fathom of black ribbon for the hat, black silk kerchief in a neat sailor’s knot around the neck, white ducks,” or trousers of undyed cotton, shod in “black pumps.”³⁷ The Los Angeles Star later decoded the painting for its readers, identifying Deppe’s merchant, missionary, and Indian attendants as “Old Friar Sanchez” standing in the foreground “in his Franciscan habit attended by his two Indian boys in their red dresses, speaking to a foreign trader.”³⁸ With its serene depiction of mission and church, peaceful members of the Tongva people, and a nattily attired foreign merchant, Deppe visually constructs the perfect mission.

The symbolism in Deppe’s composition merits additional discussion. Tellingly, the artist positioned his merchant as equal to the Franciscan father. Although both are agents of power and change, the merchant symbolizes the increasing impact of global trade on nineteenth-century Alta California. He is a unique addition to the mission-painting genre, not seen in similar depictions of the era. Deppe himself might have been the hide and tallow merchant in his painting.³⁹ Noted art and architecture historian Norman Neuerburg believes that Deppe modeled his merchant on Robinson.⁴⁰

Also significant are Deppe’s Native figures. Where Robinson’s Mission San Gabriel omitted Native people, they were essential to Deppe’s imagery, and to his purposes. Deppe omitted the dire consequences missionization held for Native peoples, emphasizing instead its success in instilling the purported benefits of Catholicism and assimilation to Hispanic culture. He painted the Tongva at the mission as supposedly happy and content in abandoning their previous lifeways and cultural practices. Deppe’s presumption of Christian ideological dominance and European racial superiority is evident in his emphasis on the peaceful participation of Native Californians at the mission. He reifies, celebrates, and aestheticizes the settler colonial displacement of Native American religion and culture.⁴¹

Robinson and Deppe’s art shows that they understood they were facing a potentially significant societal transformation from one colonial arrangement to another. Despite General Victoria’s January 1831 ouster of Echeandía, debate over secularization in Alta California continued. Robinson and Deppe continued to propound their view that progress in Alta California depended upon missionaries and foreign trade. As foreign traders engaged in commerce with the missions, Robinson and Deppe had reason to fear secularization, which could negatively affect their personal finances as well as their status with their business associates—Robinson with Bryant & Sturgis and Deppe with the principal of his trading house, Henry Virmond.⁴²

Many of the merchant-artists’ Californio contemporaries disagreed with the pro-mission stance Robinson and Deppe took in their art. Pío de Jesus Pico, for example, a member of the Mexican government from 1828 to 1848, disparaged those who idealized the missions and missionaries. Pico deemed civilians, not missionaries, as the “sacred core of the nation.”⁴³ General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo likewise dismissed the “mission-centric interpretation of California’s past” as imperceptive.⁴⁴ Vallejo found common soldiers more important to the origins of California than the “medieval” missionaries, whom he called “backward economically and intellectually.”⁴⁵ As early as 1833, Vallejo denounced missionaries as “tyrants” for routinely whipping neophytes at the missions in San Rafael and San Francisco.⁴⁶ Indeed, Vallejo called out Alfred Robinson by name as one of “the foreigners who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the missionaries.” To Vallejo, “Robinson’s tactics” in aligning with mission interests were not surprising, “since he was married to one of Don José de la Guerra y Noriega’s daughters.” As Vallejo noted cynically, the marriage aligned the merchant with the “síndico procurador of the missions” and gave Robinson access to “the milk in the cocoa-nut.”⁴⁷

As the 1830s unfolded, the days of missionary monopoly over Alta California’s land, labor, and trade grew more tenuous. In late 1831, young, liberal Californios violently overthrew Governor Manuel Victoria after only eleven months in office. Victoria escaped to Mission San Gabriel and later sailed to San Blas in Baja California aboard the hide and tallow ship Pocahontas. Also on board were Father Antonio Peyrí and Quechla scholars Pablo Tac and Agapito Amamix from Mission San Luis Rey.⁴⁸

In describing Victoria’s escape, Robinson sympathetically called him a “poor, weak, wounded soldier!”⁴⁹ But the overthrow of Victoria worried Robinson too: ever watchful over his financial concerns, he later admitted that Victoria’s departure “rendered it necessary for me to repair to Santa Bárbara, to look after our interests; for we knew not what would be the result of this unfortunate change.”⁵⁰

The push to usurp missionary power gained traction on May 9, 1833, when the report of a three-person commission in Mexico City advocated freeing California Indians from their “hard slavery” at the missions. The commission decried “the evils which afflicted the natives subject to the missions both in the moral and political aspects…[and] the sad fate of these unfortunate beings.”⁵¹

Despite his depictions of mission serenity, Robinson knew of these abuses. Although “the greater portion of the Indians” attended daily Mass, he later recalled, it was

Three months later, on August 17, 1833, Mexico issued its Decree of the Congress of Mexico Secularizing the Missions. One year later came Alta California’s Provincial Ordinance for the Secularization of the Missions of Upper California, which provided guidelines for redistributing mission lands and assets. All of the Alta California missions would be secularized between 1834 and 1836. Despite secularists’ proclamations of concern for the Indians, few received any of those assets. Historian Michael Gonzales writes:

Whether or not they were aware of plans for mission lands and goods, some neophytes exacted punishment on the missionaries. In 1832 Eulalia Pérez, llavera (keeper of the keys) and manager of Mission San Gabriel, recorded that armed Indigenous peoples from San Luis Obispo, San Juan Capistrano, and other missions surrounded Mission San Gabriel. They captured Father Sánchez when he attempted to leave, cut his horses’ reins, dragged him from his wagon, and confined him to his room. Sánchez was bleeding from his ears when he emerged eight days later. Complaining of continual pain in his head, Sánchez died about one month later. His confinement and injuries suggest that local Natives felt little affection for Fr. Sánchez.⁵⁵

From 1834 to 1836, provincial and Mexico City authorities oversaw redistribution of mission lands and assets. Within ten years, Californios, not the missions, were Alta California’s large landholders. Californios dominated the region’s cattle ranching operations, exporting hides and tallow to international and American East Coast markets.⁵⁶

The immense value of the hide and tallow trade renewed interest among U.S. political and commercial leaders in gaining control over Alta California. Among them was Alfred Robinson. In his memoir, Life in California, published in 1846, Robinson wrote in favor of U.S. acquisition of the Mexican province. Among other benefits, he suggested that American annexation of Alta California would end Mexican mismanagement, which he called “military despotism on a petty scale,” and bring self-government enjoyed by Americans.⁵⁷ “In this age of ‘Annexation,’” asked Robinson, alluding perhaps to the 1845 annexation by the United States of Mexico’s former province of Texas, “why not extend the ‘area of freedom’ by the annexation of California? Why not plant the banner of liberty there?” Then, in language reminiscent of John L. O’Sullivan’s concept of manifest destiny, Robinson proclaimed that a transcontinental United States was the nation’s destiny. “All this may come to pass,” concluded Robinson, “and indeed it must come to pass, for the march of emigration is to the West, and naught will arrest its advance but the mighty ocean.”⁵⁸

Robinson’s book furthered that aim by encouraging Americans to settle in California. He redeployed his 1831 sketch of Mission San Gabriel (Figure 1) along with sketches of several other missions. In what might have been the inaugural mission tour, Robinson took readers along the coast, from mission to mission, describing a magical land of plenty where one drank chocolate and dined on luscious fruits. His narrative attempted to do more than generate interest in Alta California: With flattering descriptions of affable, humorous, and generous Franciscan overseers, Robinson portrayed Catholicism in a positive light for Protestant, possibly nativist and xenophobic readers. He posited the Franciscan missions as the foundation upon which a new American California could be built.

Robinson’s book was timely. Acting on standing orders to seize California in the event of war between Mexico and the United States, U.S. Naval Commodore John D. Sloat sailed into Monterey and raised the U.S. flag on July 7, 1846. Two years later, at the end of the U.S.–Mexico War, Alta California was ceded to the United States with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gold Rush began to gain momentum.⁵⁹ Life in California was widely read by newly arrived fortune seekers and settlers.

Along with Robinson’s book and its glorification of the missions, one of Deppe’s Mission San Gabriel paintings hung in the home of prominent Santa Barbara merchant Daniel Hill, grantee of Rancho La Goleta.⁶⁰ Hill was “one of the best known and almost legendary figures of Santa Bárbara” who rented Mission Santa Bárbara for nine years, from 1845 to 1854.⁶¹ As Hill welcomed newcomers into the mission after the U.S. conquest, they would have viewed Deppe’s painting.

Robinson and Deppe’s artwork idealizing the missions proved timely in yet another way. New artists used their paintings as models for their own art. Ten years after Robinson’s Life in California and what might be called the first “mission tour,” artist Henry Miller (1827–1916) completed the first set of twenty-one mission drawings for his 1856 Account of a Tour of the California Missions and Towns. Like Deppe and Robinson, Miller centers church buildings and grounds, though sky and mountains occupy much of the composition (Figure 3). In the lower right corner, a single traveler on horseback approaches the mission. Miller likewise provided vivid descriptions of each mission. Not all descriptions are cheerful. For example, the Mission San Gabriel text menaces the visitor, as “the haunt of some notorious cattle thieves; murders are committed here frequently often as the result of the fandangos which are given almost every night, breaking up in a row and a stabbing or shooting affair.”⁶² Yet no hint of this chaos appears in Miller’s sketch, which, following Robinson and Deppe’s lead, shows the mission as calm and peaceful.

Three years later, on December 24, 1859, the Los Angeles Star praised Deppe’s work as “the only proper painting ever made of one of the missions during their flourescence [sic], and with its intrinsic merits,” the work was “worthy of careful preservation.”⁶³ This embrace of Deppe’s idealized art was merely the beginning of what art historian Michael Komanecky describes as popularization of a “romantic vision of the missions, almost always blind to the devastating effects that Spanish colonization, including the missionary enterprise, had on native populations.”⁶⁴

Between 1876 and 1882, Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916) photographed most of the California missions, producing perhaps the earliest collection of mission photographs.⁶⁵ In the photograph shown in Figure 4, Watkins includes the palm tree as it appears spatially and stylistically in Deppe’s painting. His aim to capture all of the missions in a series hearkens back to Robinson’s first “mission tour.” Writing in 2018, art historian Tyler Green credits Watkins for “California’s embrace of the Spanish colonial past as its own.” Watkins’s approach aligns with that of Robinson and Deppe, as he followed a longer line of Anglo-Americans, as well as the Prussian Deppe, all of whom had embraced the Spanish and pre-secularization Mexican missions as a romanticized emblem of Western civilization in California.

Between 1877 and 1884, Oriana Weatherbee Day (1838–1886) painted all twenty-one missions. Her painting of Mexican-era Mission San Gabriel (Figure 5) centers mission buildings, with mounted riders and grazing animals foregrounded at the painting’s lower edge. None of the figures is identifiably Indian, though the painting’s handful of cattle suggests the prominence of Alta California’s hide and tallow trade. Reminiscent of Deppe’s and Robinson’s artwork, Day’s painting presents an illusion. As Michael Komanecky explains, Day depicts the church “as pristine, as if it had been just completed.” In fact, photographs show that, by the 1860s, the church was “in dilapidated condition, its roof collapsed and walls crumbling. The scene Day depicts is one of an ‘imaginary past.’”⁶⁶ In painting the missions, artists like Day preferred fantasy versions of the past to the realities before them. Already, romantic depictions of the missions were the dominant style.

Artist Henry Chapman Ford (1828–1894), Day’s contemporary, included paintings of all twenty-one missions in his 1883 Etchings of the Franciscan Missions of California. In his painting of Mission San Gabriel (Figure 6), Ford places his palm tree in the lower right corner, just as Deppe did sixty years earlier. Ford repeatedly cites Life in California in his descriptions of the missions, regarding Robinson as an essential primary source on Mexican-era missions.⁶⁷

Ford drew also on the work of German artist and merchant Edward Vischer. Like Deppe, Vischer had worked in the hide and tallow trade with Henry Virmond. In 1872 Vischer published his own visual and textual mission tour, Missions of Upper California.⁶⁸ He included an 1865 sketch of Mission San Luis Rey in which a heavenly light breaks through the clouds to illuminate the mission, suggesting divine sanction. Likewise, Vischer’s drawing of Mission San Gabriel presents the mission as dominating the landscape, the structure presumed to represent civilization transplanted onto the natural landscape. According to art and architecture historian Norman Neuerburg, one of Ford’s notebooks included a folded sheet with “references to the watercolors of Vischer, which he must finally have been able to consult.”⁶⁹ Ford’s work confirms that mission artists worked within an accepted style, one that stretched back to the works of Robinson and Deppe. Writing in 1982, art historian Nancy Dustin Wall Moure discusses Ford as one of the artists in the “early years of the ‘cult of the missions’” who felt “called upon to illustrate…numerous articles and books” about the missions.⁷⁰

Between 1897 and 1900, English-born artist Edwin Deakin (1838–1923) published three separate sets of paintings representing the twenty-one missions. In San Gabriel Mission, light shines on the mountain above the centered and somewhat mystical mission, suggesting divine sanction upon the building itself and its majestic setting (Figure 7). According to art historian Samantha Burton, Deakin worked within the established genre of romantic mission art “produced by soldiers, sailors, and topographical artists in the employ of military and trade ventures.” Deakin drew “directly and indirectly on all these sources” for his own work.”⁷¹ The artist was highly regarded in his own time, exhibiting his first set of mission paintings in 1900 at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel.⁷² His contemporaries viewed Deakins as an “art historian” and appealed to the state of California to purchase his paintings because of the “important historical work they performed.” Nonetheless, observes Burton, Deakin’s art is historically inaccurate. In a visual tradition stretching back to the 1830s, Deakin “divorces the missions from history, even as he asks his viewers to celebrate and preserve” a fantasy version of California history.⁷³

One final artist to be considered here is Edith Buckland Webb (1878–1959). As a young woman, Webb came by her fascination with the missions through her grandmother who, just before the Gold Rush, had lived in one of the rooms of San Francisco’s Mission Dolores. After her 1901 marriage to photographer Hugh Webb, Edith hand-tinted the photographic postcards and enlargements that supported the family, including photographs of missions San Diego, San Juan Capistrano, and San Fernando. By the mid-1930s, Webb was researching and painting her own series of idealized Alta California mission paintings.⁷⁴

As many had before her, Webb painted all twenty-one missions, which she included in her 1952 book, Indian Life at the Old Missions. Intriguingly, rather than one of her own paintings, Webb chose the Deppe painting of Mission San Gabriel for her book’s front and back inside covers. She noted that, in her efforts to accurately represent the missions of Alta California, she had “long sought” images of Deppe’s work. Webb also quoted extensively from Robinson’s Life in California, which she called a “standard work” on the hide and tallow trade.⁷⁵

As she painted, Webb began crafting in her backyard an inch-to-the-foot model of Mission San Diego (Figure 8). The model included unevenly plastered and whitewashed walls, carved doors and windows, scale furniture and tools, thousands of miniature terracotta tiles, and innumerable tiny figures engaged in the tasks of daily life at the mission. Webb unveiled her model of Mission San Diego in the garden of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel. World War II halted Webb’s plans to complete models of all twenty-one Mexican-era missions. Her commitment to reproducing mission history, speaks to the public’s enduring fascination with the state’s constructed and romanticized colonial past.⁷⁶

Californio Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo railed against the “cult of the mission” that emerged in his own lifetime. According to Vallejo, the mission-centric version of California history was not only misguided; it was inaccurate. Vallejo attempted to counter the prevailing romantic mission mythology so popular among newly migrated Anglo-Americans by writing his own extensive history of California, Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, 1769–1849, completed in 1875. Vallejo explained his aims in a letter to his cousin, Juan Bautista Alvarado, stating, “before we die,” it was necessary for the Californios who made Alta California possible “to narrate, at the very least, the true history of our country.” Vallejo specifically identified Robinson as one of the writers whose memoirs were “filled with lies” and “short on truths.”⁷⁷ Historians Robert Senkewicz and Rose Marie Beebe call Vallejo’s history of California “the most complete study of Alta California” authored “by anyone who lived in or traveled through the region” before the American takeover.⁷⁸

Yet, despite Vallejo’s best efforts to counter a popular narrative idealizing the missions or to combat the anti-Mexican bias that he experienced as Americans and others overran his country, Robinson and Deppe’s fantasy version of California history prevailed. The view Robinson promoted in his 1846 book, that the missions were the foundation of the U.S. colonization of California, was the message that stuck. The foreign-born merchant-artists’ fantasy renderings of the perfect mission became the standard by which other artists, and then California boosters, presented the fantasy version of California history. Many preferred this vision to one that, if truth were told, would necessarily feature the violence that Spanish, Mexican, then American conquerors wreaked upon the landscapes and Native peoples of Alta California.

At this writing, the Laguna Art Museum holds one of Deppe’s paintings of Mission San Gabriel; the Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library owns the other.⁷⁹ Starting with Robinson and Deppe, artists have represented Mission San Gabriel within a fantasy framework for nearly two centuries. After a fire nearly destroyed the mission in 2020, it recently reopened in 2023 with a new on-site museum exhibition curated by historians Yve Chavez (Tongva) and Steven Hackel. This exhibition provides conditions for imagining new frameworks and new art as it “incorporates Native beliefs, understandings, and artifacts,” in its explanations of the mission’s history and “incorporates Native people as partners in the telling of their own story…for the first time.” As Hackel states, the Tongva “communities survived the terrible challenges of the mission period, and they are still active today in this mission and in this region.”⁸⁰ Innovations that move away from the past paradigms are afoot.

This article adds to an abundance of literature that reexamines nineteenth-century California history using different lenses. It explores the intersection between imperialism, art, trade, and secularization of the Alta California missions, focusing on the early 1830s drawings of Mission San Gabriel by Robinson and Deppe, and Robinson’s book, Life in California. It aims to contribute to public dialogue and knowledge about how the relationship between history and public memory is often mediated by art.

As many California historians have shown in recent decades, the mission-centric mythology worked to justify Anglo-American racial, economic, and political hierarchies. Its predominance pushed to the background Native Californians’ human rights and their claims to land, heritage, and culture. It worked to simplify and sideline complex questions about identity, injustices, and suffering that resulted from colonization, the clash of multiple ethnic groups and cultures within emerging megalopolises, and the role of religion in colonial conquest. Like other origin stories, mission-centrism posited the beauty of architecture and landscape, combined with Christian missionary ardor as a favorable beginning to California history. The missions were employed as a new way to understand and imagine the thirty-first state. When Carey McWilliams aptly identified the idealized “Spanish Fantasy Heritage Past,” he also provided the pathway to new aesthetic and conceptual formations; that is, those based on more rigorous evidence-based history. New inquiries, archives, dialogues, and histories are required. Hopefully this article makes a small contribution to this ongoing effort.