 This is one of his little vignettes from one of his sample sheets. There are nine of them. I have a booklet over there which has reprints of all of them. And this is grafting material over there. You can pick it up and look at it. This happens to be the steamer Berkeley, the ferry docked with the University of California on the hill. Of course, I still don't have the faintest idea what stock certificate or whatever it was he used it for. Here's our man, Grafton Tyler Brown. When I gave this talk on August 1st to Beverly Hayes at the Linda Brooks Burton Branch Library in Bayview, I had a large audience of two ladies. Both of them looked at Grafton and said, of course he's African-American. So it turned out to be very obvious to those who wish to see Brown as African-American. For those who didn't care, he passed into the regular society. Above all, Brown was very self-confident and he always advertised himself in any way possible. This is a small little stamp about the size of a postage stamp, and actually resembling the California revenue stamps that he put on his envelopes to advertise himself. So he was a real go-getter, born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Washington's birthday, 1841. His father, they were a family of free blacks in Maryland, and they migrated to Harrisburg. Of course, in the 1850s, this is when the federal government began enforcing the fugitive slave law, part of the compromise of 1850 that got some Western territory, well actually I shouldn't say territory because it never was a territory, into the United States as the 31st Star. I trust I don't have to mention its name to this audience. Anyway, and the president that Pennsylvania gave us was James Buchanan in 1956, and he was about as southern as anyone could be born in the north. So the Browns did have fear of slave catchers. Plus it turns out that his father Thomas Brown was not born in Maryland. As his son Cassius Brown remembered, he was born in South Carolina. Talk about wanting to keep your past secret. So the Browns were very happy in Pennsylvania. Grafton was the eldest of four boys, went to school, dad had a small business. I believe he dealt in the wares that crimp Jarvis over there deals with, that is bars. And in 1858, young Grafton, then 17, came west to California. Archie Lee, that's a woodcut by Millet Dean, since we have such a great books collection upstairs. And it's been reprinted by Moore, forgotten, mental blank. It's wife Shirley Ann Moore who wrote the afterward in my book. And he does the Underground Railroad Survey at a Sacramento. They reprinted Archie Lee, which is a fugitive slave case, which meant that the long arm of the government even reached the California. The ship is the Golden Gate. I mentioned that. She was wrecked off Manzanillo in 1852. Her bell is on the sixth floor. Brown was a steward at the St. George's Hotel in Sacramento. In 1859, he drew an image of the British steamship Great Eastern, which was the largest ship in the world, but I believe five funnels and six mass, and iron, had a screw propeller as well as the side wheels. Anyway, the Sacramento Union noticed, which was the mightiest paper in California. It was the paper of a record. It said, you know, good art done by Grafton Brown. Next year, Brown entered a railroad locomotive into the State Agricultural Affair. Hey, you know, good work. He's an artist. In San Francisco, Thomas Keekle, who had done the great, excuse me, Charles Keekle, had done the great 50 lithographic views in California cities. He was falling on hard times. His partner, Emil Dressel, began whining that as he went off to Sonoma County and established a vineyard that is still here. So Keekle needed someone, a sketch artist who would go out, survey areas, get people to subscribe, get people to pay more for little vignettes, and everything else. So Brown left Sacramento, either late 60 or early 61. You can see the city directory for San Francisco lists Brown as colored. When he came to San Francisco, there was no such designation. And city directories in San Francisco listed colored through 1875. So essentially, Brown had passed and he became Keekle's survey man. That lithograph, which is on the cover of my book and we'll see again, is the first view of Virginia City, Nevada. It came on the market about very early June 61, so Brown probably drew it either in April or May, somewhere in there. And this is Grafton Brown. This is the artist he's become. Well, how do you cover yourself if you're a black man and you're passing as white? Well, you work for the most racist Democrats you can find. As you can see the 1869 ballot there, no Negro or Chinese suffrage. The list of gentlemen there, and I can use that word loosely, are the Tide Lands Commission. Benjamin Franklin Washington is the most prominent. In 1861, he was collector of the port of San Francisco, which was the most prestigious and lucrative job on the Pacific coast. He retired in April 1861 with the New Lincoln administration kicking him out for, you know, job-wise. He says that California, the government, should recognize the independence of the Confederate States of America. So you can see where this descendant of George Washington's older brother heart lies. So he was quiet during the war, came back in 1865 as the editor of a newspaper which had been called the Democratic Press. The Unionists tossed it out in the street when the news came of Lincoln's assassination, and the military commander told the proprietor, well, you got to get rid of the editor and you got to change the name. So the new editor was Benjamin Franklin Washington. The paper was The Examiner. Needless to say, its columns were a bit racist, to put it mildly. Lithography. You can all get stoned now because it was done on three or four inch slabs of limestone. By mid-70s, they had moved to zincography. And where letterpress printing is confined to right angles, essentially, because you have to set the type. Lithography could be anything you wanted to draw. And the whole premise was that oil and water don't mix. So in the 1790s, Sainton Felter in Austria invented using oil-based ink on very fine limestone to draw his drawing, and then with everything else, with the water to prevent the ink spreading, and he would then put a paper on it. You could also use transfer paper and copy the image or flip the image over. This happens to be a 1906 stone by Britton and Ray. For a firm, you might recognize even in reverse Levi Strauss and company. On the left, Levi's has that in their archives. On the left, you can see is the artist's drawing. Then they took this very polished stone, and you can see the artist in the center transferring it, and his arms rested on boards because if he touched the stone with his fingers, it's going to leave the grease, and your art's ruined, so it was very delicate. Then the pressman on the right. Grafton Brown was on the block of clay between Sansom and Montgomery. There are about a dozen or more printers, usually in the upper floors. He was at, what do I have there, 540? Anyway, that was the second building from Montgomery, and right where the advertisement ends, that thin building there, that's where Grafton Brown was. Well, we have some show-offs here. On the left is Edward Bosky, considered the father of fine printing in San Francisco. In the mid-1860s, he decided to go into letterpress printing, and if you're a new guy, what do you do? You try and show up. The old guy. Well, the best printer in town, and the largest, was Town and Bacon. So Bosky decided that he was going to do books of poems that were much better than Town and Bacon could do. And this one by James Linnon, there on the very far left, from 1869, is one of the two early books that Bosky did, which marked the birth of fine printing in San Francisco. Well, the 1870s was the era when lithography really came to the fore, even though Britton and Ray and others had been doing it since Britton and Ray since 1852. For job work and stock certificates and other things, it really blossomed. So Bosky decided that he would jump into chromolithography, or color lithography. So he did California grape vines, 1878, which is considered the masterpiece still of California chromolithography. Hannah Millard did the watercolors, and then Bosky turned them into these great prints. The other show off is my good friend, Grafton Tyler Brown. You can see the ornate-ness of his bill head, and I've written out what the scroll says. He began in 1865. Charles Kiekel Died Brown bought the business. So what does Brown do? Well, he decides to make the first chromolithography in San Francisco, and he did this cover for a travel guide. Make your mark. You're the new guy. Most printing then was letter press, with movable type, set into frame, squared off. On the left we have Edward Bosky, who did a very minimalist look. A lot of the modern 20th century printers love old Bosky for that. So those are his examples. You can always tell a Bosky printing on job printing because it is so minimalist. On the other is the women's cooperative printing union, formed in 1869. The regular typographical union would not let women work, or a bunch of rats, they're going to drive down the wages. So Lizzie Richmond, I guess I should get in a plug in here since I worked for Wells Fargo. James Latham, one of our bankers, was one of the incorporators of the women's cooperative printing union, and its office is where the bank's museum is today. 420 Montgomery. Anyway, Lizzie says, okay, you think we can't do it? That Bill Head on the left side says, women set type. Women run presses. Call and examine specimens. We invite criticism. And it seems like the ladies signed everything they did. And they mastered all of the prevalent styles of letterpress printing. That's why I've used them as an example. Britton and Ray, the largest of California companies, a threesome which was very good at dividing labor. Englishman Joseph Britton was the general artist. Frenchman Joseph Ray did portraitist. And Henry Steininger, who was from Switzerland, did lettering. In 1870 they had five lithographic presses with eight men and a boy for the staff. In 1880 there were 11 men and two boys. And the son Valentine Ray was a partner in guitar chocolate, which of course is still around with us. And you can see Britton and Ray had monopolized overall advertising envelopes. And I blew up the top of the guitar building there because you can see the detail they're getting on something that's only a couple eighths of an inch. Then of course their own Bill Head and the very ornate Wakeley. This was Brown's main competition. Albert Bancroft, Albert Little Bancroft, the brother of Hubert Howe Bancroft, AL did the printing for his brother's history factory. They began lithography in 1870 and they sort of have a flowery sort of indecise, whatever, whatever type of design. But again I blew up the top of the Bancroft building there so you can see that on the right. Of course we have a little competition here. On the left you see two views of the California Cracker Company at Battery and Broadway. The left one was done by Grafton Tyler Brown. And you can see his focus, the lighting, is on the short side of the building along Broadway. Bancroft did him one better and put his focus on the long side along Battery and he also has smoke coming out of the chimney. Like it's a working factory. So these printers would always try and do one better than the other. Schmidt became the largest lithographer in California. That firm lasted until 1994. Those of you who cross the Emperor Norton Bridge, coming into San Francisco, if you look on the left you'll see a clock tower, which is now apartments. That's the old Schmidt factory. Max Schmidt came from Germany, he was a sailor, didn't know what to do, sort of stumbled into lithography. He worked for a couple of years for Grafton Brown. When he published his memoirs in 1922, he had a remark that he had worked for that colored man Brown. This is how Harry Peters, when he did California on Stone in 1935, picked up that Grafton Brown was African American because of Schmidt's memoirs. Brown had died in 1918, so he wasn't around to say anything about it. But Schmidt became, as I say, the largest and it absorbed most of the other firms. You can see even early on, using zincography, rather than the stone, it turned out to be a very good lithographer. And let me see where it is. Yes, the wine is Eberhardt and Lachmann. It's a draft or a bill of exchange, a type of check. But you can see the very delicate work and that's very early for Schmidt. All those are 1870s, the time he was fighting with Brown. Okay, here we have Grafton. So instead of the letterpress, you have versatile stone lithography where right angles did not restrain the design, nor were curves any problem. You could write it out. So this is the type of thing he did, very, very stunning, and his own designs. And in the 70s, his lithography began replacing letterpress. You had the most prominent companies, like Levi's and others, using Grafton. As you can see, letterpress versus Grafton. And the top is, who is that? I think it's Francis and Valentine. If it's not, it's Winterburn. And then, within a year later, you have Yates, which, of course, in this biased lecture, Brown comes out ahead. Same thing with another firm, William Harrison, who's had a very good sense of design for letterpress. He got into lithography a bit, but he wasn't so good at that. But, you know, which billhead stands out? At the time, the billheads were so important because there wasn't that much advertising. Newspapers, by the presses they used, were essentially a column width. So you just get a very small, you know, line ad. And there was no other ways that they really advertised. This is the 70s. 1880s, you started getting into chromolithograph trade cards, and then on. As a presses change, you could do whole pages. The coffee company. Here we have a little battle. The top one is by Schmidt. The middle one is by Grafton Brown. And then Schmidt came back with a much better design. Is that a question back there or a scratch? Okay, no probes. I answer questions, too. So here we go. Schmidt, Brown Schmidt. Receipts, just sort of a summary. The top two on the left are Women's Cooperative Printing Union. Very nicely done. Bottom left, Sparse, of course, is Ed Boski. On the right, the two, of course, are Grafton, where he's really had fun with the logos on the left side. And the bottom one is Bancroft, and I think that's what a Bancroft receives. But it's sort of flowery and whatever. Taking stock. This is where job printing really took off. These are a couple of competitors. The top two are George F. Baker, who is very good at city views, maps, and things like that. But he never really found his niche doing job printing. In fact, where Grafton Brown had a staff of four in 1870 and ended up with eight in 1880, Baker began with four in 1870 and ended up with three in 1880. But those are the top two. You can see he's a good artist, but there's really no sense of design. Bottom is Bancroft, who's more or less stuck into printing styles and things like that. Don't really get it. Now, Britton and Ray, top guys. They did more stock certificates than anyone else. And you can see the quality in Britton and Ray. I like the leopard one. And you can see on the right one, the M for Mining and Milling Company. And where they picked up on the A for the Argonaut and they've got the Greek ship. So this is who Brown is making his name against. So here we have Grafton. One of my favorites. This is from Bodey. But you can see he's covered the whole thing. On the summit, he's got all the details about the stock. And it's just a very nicely designed striking certificate. Of course, we might add the more elaborate the certificates at times often the mine had less silver or gold in it. Like the Wells Fargo Mine, which never mined any ore. It was on the Comstock. It had no connection with the banking and express firm. But it just kept assessing its stockholders. That's how it made its money. It's about the best 19th century six horse coach. I know most of them are pretty ugly. People's Ice Company. Vada County. You can see Brown has put icicles around the border to catch the theme of the company. And then, of course, it's Ice Works up there. Then, of course, the hydraulic mine with a pair of the picture. I've got a copy of the stock up there. Anyone wants to look at it. The stuff up here, you know, afterwards you can pick it. If you can't read it, pick it up and look at it. That's why it's there. This was one of Brown's favorite artworks. The two miners who then, when he flipped them over, became three miners. Once they got rid of, once the feds in 72 said, we don't need revenue stamps anymore, Brown moved the vignette to the left side, added a third miner. And then everyone else picked it up. The one on the left is a Britain and Ray. And, you know, Jay Gould, the old Robert Barron, Helena Montana, and Hale and Norcross, it just became one of the stock mining vignettes. And that's a grafted. The ephemeral job work, of course, I found these notes for sale about two years after the auction was over, so I couldn't quite bid. But these were just advertising notes for businesses. You'd flip them over and they would tell you about the business, resembling the local U.S. currency, sort of. So what I did was, from Brown's sample sheets, I took the photocopies and then scanned the actual vignettes from his sample sheets. So even on the small stuff, he has a sense of design. Britain and Ray also did these and they look very similar. Okay, here we go to his city views, which are best known. This is, again, the Comstock, 1861, the first view. And 1864, Brown also did the second view. You can see how it's grown and he changed the way he's looking at it. Another battle, sheet music. It's a very modeling song. The two girls are placing flowers on the grave of their mother in the dead of winter. On the left is a Britain and Ray. On the right is Grafton Brown. And notice what Grafton has done is he's enlarged the winter scene, so you really know it's winter. And also the wind is hitting the back of the umbrella. So notice on his title under the snow, he slanted the icicles showing the winds blowing, where Britain and Ray has something that's more static. The snow was just there. A couple of his other things, a very large certificate membership in the Wales Cambrian Society. And he also did news items. This was for a paper called the newsletter, a semi-weekly, or bi-weekly. And it's the blowing up of Blossom Rock, which was a menaced navigation in San Francisco Harbor. They got it down to 50 feet below water and there's been talk of taking it down a bit more. Chromolithography. John S. Dees was a San Franciscan. He went up to British Columbia, I believe in 58 or thereabouts, when the African-American population or a large portion abandoned San Francisco because the legislature was going to pass a law banning all blacks from entering California. Happily, the very few Republicans in the legislature pulled a little parliamentary maneuver and it died. But he was the, if not the first, one of the first salmon fishermen up out of Victoria, British Columbia. And here's one of his labels. Standard soap. This is the inside box lid because a merchant, when he was displaying the soap, would open the top of the box. The works are over in Berkeley. There are enough brethren here. I can mention the healing waters. CHS has the one on the left, Library of Congress the one on the right. But you can see it's mastery of chromolithography for ordinary advertising. This was just job work. But trying to stand out, trying to make people take notice of both what's being advertised and then, hey, we like this. Who did it? Maps. Brown made most of his money off of maps. I think I found about 80 of them. Most of them are from Oakland. Real estate maps from the 1870s. The one on the left is one of his government patronage. So I figured out he voted Democratic because he got the account to do tideland maps. And he did about six of them or so. Six or seven. He made a thousand or so dollars off of it. This is good money. Gold was essentially $20 an ounce. So you can figure out how many ounces of gold that is. And then Highland Park where Highland Hospital is. Sessions was one of the realtors he normally used. But you can see the skill he's put into these and the artistry. The way he's done on the tidelands and the Highland Park where he's having fun with the lettering. One of Silver City, Nevada. You can see how he's done Table Mountain on the left and the Devil's Gate toll road on the right. He's added a little, you know, it's not just a map. He's added something to it. By the end of the 70s, his business was starting to collapse. The Nevada mining boom, the Comstock ran out of ore. And most of the other places did. So stocks were going down. He never did sheet music after about 74. The Oakland real estate boom started dying out. So he's looking for new things. And this was the time when the mug books or county histories came in. And what it was is you would go around and hit up the people. You know, you want to buy a book. You know, five bucks. Well, if you want to have your picture in it in a biography, that's more. So there are about 80 illustrations in this 1878 San Mateo County history and Brown and Britten and Waste, Britten and Waste split them. You can always tell Browns, this one doesn't have it. He has a normal ornament, but of course I picked one that didn't have the ornament. What can I say? You can take away all the healing waters from me and just give me plain water. Because this is the home of William H. Lawrence, who had a wife and five kids in there. But he was also superintendent of the Spring Valley Water Works, which was San Francisco's water supply company. The great history of Nevada. Brown did, in the first hundred or so pages, Brown did five of them. And they were either Mines or Jim Fair's house. He was a U.S. senator before he moved on to other things. So you can see the importance. This is a double sheet one of the Mines. Well, what does he do when he runs out of lithography? He becomes a landscape artist. In 1882, the first one over here on the right is July of 82, Brown dated his canvases. This is the earliest one known as part of a pair. A lovely woman found it for me in an airline advertisement. Lovely woman. Yo, wake up. So, and then I talked to the dealer and put them in touch with Oakland and the Oakland Museum owns that one. And it was, it's, there's an exhibit either still going on or just closed at the Art Museum in Reno of Lake Tahoe. That one's up there. The other one is Mount Shasta, standing at the north-looking south, just a little small one. So Brown is now a landscape artist. What he essentially does is follow the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad. 1882, he's in Victoria. 1883, the railroad comes across. He's in Tacoma. Then moves down to Portland, where he essentially runs the Portland Art Society, the first art society in the city of the Roses. Brown was the secretary. He was the guy who did all the work. And he also taught art and everything else. In the fall of 82, he joined Amos Bowman, who was a former editor of the Mining and Scientific Press here, skilled at very many things. The island, Anacortes, he named for his wife. Anyway, he led a survey in British Columbia and Brown went along. And these were his first paintings, which he then exhibited in Victoria in the summer of probably 83 then. And he was, he was Victoria's first landscape artist. He took photographs of all of them and the British Columbia and others have some of the real ones. So I paired the photographs with the real paintings, what they look like in color. I think that one's Mount Tacoma, because Seattle won naming rights at its Mount Rainier. Brown painted items that would be popular with tourists. This was his market once he was up in the Pacific Northwest. And lastly, he ended up in Yellowstone, which is from about 1886 to 1891. He painted views of Yellowstone. In my book, I have two order forms. What it was, he lithographed sketches, numbered them, and you could write them and say, hey, I want one of those and one of those and one of those. And his letterhead from Helena with, of course, old faithful and, of course, lithographed. Well, after the book came out, some guy came up with some pictures. Brown worked for the Army Corps of Engineers in the 90s, got married, then was a draftsman for the city of St. Paul for about 20-odd years. And in the 1899, he took up photography because some of these photographs have G.T. Brown on the back of them. This is Brown on the left and his home studio with all of his artwork and other artwork. So he just kept on going, reinventing himself and loving his art to the end. Thank you. Thank you, Tom.