Pio Pico Mystery Artist Discovered!

It’s safe to say most of today’s Californians have heard the name Pío Pico, even if they can’t place him as the last Mexican governor of California. He was a man who started with nothing and ended with nothing, but was among the richest Californians along the way. As a museum housing a large collection of historically-valuable Southern California objects, it follows naturally that the Bowers Museum owns quite a few items from the man’s life. Take for example Pío Pico’s personal horse-drawn carriage, an item most visitors to the museum would immediately recognize if for no reason other than that it’s dimensionally larger than any other artifact in the original museum wing by a factor of at least two (barring perhaps Don Juan Foster’s liquor still). The list of other Pío Pico artifacts in the Segerstrom gallery includes photographs, spurs, a box for the man’s snuff, spoons, his cape and a portrait—the real highlight of our memorial. This particular likeness finds Pío Pico in his later years: white-haired, bearded, and debonair as a secret agent—looking very much the part of the dignitary he had hoped to become. For a man who had possibly suffered from a tumor affecting his pituitary gland, with a resulting effect on his appearance throughout most of his life, this painting may have been one of the first images of Pío Pico to show the man without any disfiguration. The issue with this particular painting, though, is one of attribution: for years it has hung in the Segerstrom gallery above a label reading, “Artist Unknown.”

Naturally a mystery artist could not be let stand, so further research had to be done. Sadly though, like so many of the Bowers’ older accessions, the painting in question was donated with almost no information attached. Queries into the museum database were equally fruitless, mostly detailing the many exploits of the object’s distinguished subject. Often times determining a painting’s artist is as simple as checking the corners for a signature. From the inspection that could be done with the painting hanging high in the Segerstrom gallery, there was no signature in any of the usual places. Having almost given up hope that we would ever discover anything on the painting, we found tucked away at the very back of the painting’s file the artist’s signature Xeroxed from an unknown source and a small note stating the back of the painting is signed! With that we had cause enough to take down the painting from the Segerstrom gallery wall on which it was hung, and finally get a good enough look at it to find an inscription. On February 3rd, with the help of Chief Preparator Jason and Preparator David from the Bowers Museum’s fabrication department, the painting was taken down for inspection. Looked at for the first time in nearly two decades the excitement in the room was thick. The painting was turned to show the back of the canvas revealing – nothing. Not wanting to give up, the front of the dark painting was then examined closely with light.

It’s worth noting that a particularly bold artist might—rather than having their signature in a corner—instead place their name in a central location: take for example El Greco’s, Burial of Count Orgaz, in which the painter’s son carries a note with the signature in pocket.  Ultimately when we did discover the painting’s signature it was neither anywhere obvious, nor cleverly inserted. Hovering almost imperceptibly just askew of Pío Pico’s right shoulder we found the same text from the Xeroxed note, in dull red letters it spelled out: H.J. Frey ‘/68,.

The discovery of the signature felt like a victory, but the next step was determining just who H.J. Frey was. While H.J. Frey’s living and postmortem reputation may not have attracted the volumes of research that (arbitrarily for the sake of comparison) Vincent van Gogh’s exclusively postmortem fame attracted, that fact does not mean there is no information on the man whatsoever. We do know that H.J. Frey painted some version of Pío Pico in 1868. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Pío Pico had to sit down in front of Frey and have his portrait done. Frey could have instead worked off of a photograph, or copied from another artist’s painting, but it is safe to assume that H.J. Frey lived in California in 1868 as Pío Pico was principally of interest to Californians. The aforementioned Xeroxed page also had a handwritten note reading, “Henry Frey, Lithographer, N.Y., Gross & Wallace Dictionary of American Artist… 1564-1860.” The reference book places Frey in New York in 1853-1855 (Groce, 1957), which is troublesome because it places a distance of about two and a half thousand miles between the two men. Could a Henry Frey have traveled out to California and painted a portrait of Pío Pico? That’s the trouble with working off someone else’s notes, you can never be sure that they were not just grasping at air. However, we hit a stroke of luck early on in the search using askArt, a fairly comprehensive database used by the museum, and found a listing for an artist by the name Henry J. Frey, birth and death unknown, who was active in the San Francisco area in the 19th century. The only upside of so little information on H.J. Frey is that for lack of even the slightest hint of competition it seems that this Henry J. Frey is our man. Now that we knew we are looking for a man named Henry J. Frey, we immediately found a number of new references. Using San Francisco City Directories which wonderfully include the populations’ occupations, we could pinpoint exactly when Henry J. Frey was in San Francisco—between 1861 and 1870—and we started developing a narrative. In 1861 he worked at a grocery store, and already by 1862 he was working as an artist with George H. Johnson at his 649 Clay St. Studio (Langley, 1861-1871). What the job actually entailed for Frey is ambiguous, but the studio specialized in ambrotypes (Higgins, 1865)—a specific photographic process used in the 1850s and 1860s—as well as enlarging old daguerreotypes which would have been done through a process of “painting or coloring the photograph to increase contrast and reduce unsightly streaks” (Albright, 1989, p. 31). This certainly explains how someone could have practiced painting portraits despite working at a photography studio. We found too that Frey was listed in the short-lived San Francisco Art Union (Daily Alta California, 1865) which lends to the idea that he was a painter as well as a portrait photographer (Smith, 2012). As for linking this man to the New York lithographer by the same name, the sheer volume of records for the variants of H.J. Frey name make any conclusions speculation.

But, there is still very little on who Frey was and what part he played within California’s early artist community was. Fortunately, a singular listing on the askArt’s bulletin mentioned another work by H.J. Frey. A landscape in the style of Virgil Williams confirmed by San Francisco’s North Point Gallery as a copy by Frey after Williams. The askArt bulletin post pointed us towards the San Francisco Evening Bulletin from August 20, 1868, which talked about the 1868 San Francisco Art Union Exhibition at the San Francisco Mechanics Institute. Mentioned at the very end of the article are, “some California character subjects which are badly painted by H.J. Frey from vigorous original designs by [Charles Christian] Nahl, which were appropriated without the latter's permission and much to his regret and detriment” (San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 1868). Mr. Frey may have been something of a roguish type. So, returning to our painting, it seemed very possible too that our painting was a copy of some other work. A google image search for Pío Pico portraits turned up the image below, a crayon enlargement of an albumen print, and possibly the original for the painting hanging in the Segerstrom Gallery (note the slightly askew bowtie as well as the golden shirt pin, but the lack the dangling golden pieces). The enlarged photograph belongs to the Autry Museum of the American West so we hoped they would have more information on the print, but after being in contact with their staff it seems there is a similar lack of information as to the print’s history. Without more details about the origins of our painting or the enlarged print, it becomes impossible to determine which preceded the other, or if in fact either was the original. Interestingly, at the time it "was not unusual for a client to ask for a larger copy of his favourite carte portrait, and […] usually insist on an enlargement of the portrait which he knew, rather than risk getting something he might-not like" (Gernsheim, 1988, p. 236). Both the Bowers’ painting and the Autry’s enlargement were donated to the museums by Pío Pico’s descendants, so even knowing only that they were made during Pío Pico’s lifetime, it is safe to say they were originally commissioned and owned by the man himself. The conclusion is that it is possible that both were different large-scale renderings of a third item, which would have been one of Pío Pico’s favorite photographs.

With all the facts laid out, one of the most plausible and hopeful theories for the creation of our painting is as follows: Pío Pico, looking to enlarge his likeness went to ‘Higgins and Johnston, Photography Gallery’, where they specialized in copying small daguerreotypes to life size (Higgins, 1865). There Pío Pico either met with Frey who worked there, or was directed to the previously employed associate for a painted enlargement of his photograph; either way the rest is poorly documented history. Briefly during researching this painting the hypothesis arose that our painting itself could have been another of Frey’s infamous replicas, but this doesn’t seem to hold much water. When the portrait was made it was likely intended for only the sitter himself. Fortunately for Pío Pico, history has treated the man more fondly than his own experience. The don who had been so great in his lifetime and had amassed such wealth lost it all to gambling and maintaining a costly lifestyle. In the end he died a pauper. But already in the years leading up to his death people were beginning to remember Pío Pico as a man who had stood up to an unstoppable force, and when it became too much he adapted and became one of the few to profit under the new American regime, even if only for a while. He’s one of the few Californios that are still remembered.  As for Frey, it’s unclear what became of him after he left San Francisco. There are records in New York which indicate an artist by his name appeared right around 1870, Frey’s last year in California, but he disappears a few years later with no more information on what became of him. Whether doing legitimate work photographing, printing, copying, and enlarging -  or practicing his own brand of imitation - Frey was a duplicator by trade. We may still not know much about Frey, but just this year the painting is being published in A Legacy of Bounty: Paintings from the Bowers Museum, the companion catalogue to our exhibition, California Bounty: Image and Identity 1830-1950. Henry J. Frey certainly would have gotten kick out of knowing that that his painting of a print is being printed once more.