Thursday, April 17, 2025, the Ocean Beach Historical Society presents When Art and Science Met on the Southern California Coast.
In an era before photography, artists and illustrators joined the surveyors and cartographers of the United States Coast Survey in the mid-19th Century.
Be sure to join Ocean Beach Historical Society as PLNU Professor Rick Kennedy presents When Art and Science Met on the Southern California Coast: William McMurtrie and James Alden Jr., 1849-1860.
Thursday, April 17, 7:00 pm – Water’s Edge Community Center, 1984 Sunset Cliffs Blvd. Always FREE, Come on down!
Regarding the advertisement for the Art & Science lecture, the historic sketch caught my eye. Back in 1984, while researching California shore whaling stations at the Bancroft Library, I found that sketch in a file for Pigeon Point where it had been accidentally misfiled long ago. I asked the Librarian to make a copy and brought it back to San Diego then gave it to a woman at the Serra Museum. That woman decided the sketch was not important and put it in a desk drawer. Around 2005, Iris Engstrand, Ph.D. found the sketch in the desk drawer where it lay for overr 20-years and she reached out to hear my tale of how it got in the drawer. At the time, Iris Engstarand, Ph.D. was editor of the Journal of San Diego History, so published the sketch on the cover of a journal with a note about how I found it in the wrong file. Ironically, the sketch was lost again to time until it got published. The backstory is that an artist who came to California with the United States Geographical Survey hopped ship in San Francisco and sketched several 18th century Spanish missions which he intended to paint. In 1856, he sketched from the ruins of the Royal Presidio de San Diego with a view off to Point Loma and made notes of colors of sand and other things. No one knows if he ever painted using the sketch as a guide. No one even knows how it got into the Bancroft Library let alone how it got misfiled in the Pigeon Point file. I brought it to San Diego because the sketch included portions of the presidio that I consider significant to our history.