The evolution of a town and its art

Artists rarely play a part in conventional stories about the Wild West, which tend to romanticize the past by glossing over details and exaggerating the drama of mythologized highlights. For frontier tales, we get hardworking cowboys, cold-hearted gunslingers, out-of-luck prospectors, embattled ranchers, flirtatious barmaids and rapacious railroaders.

At the Laguna Art Museum, a fastidiously researched and lovingly assembled exhibition of 70 paintings, 13 watercolors and six photographs puts artists front and center as it recounts the history of California’s Central Coast. “Artists at Continent’s End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875-1907” tells the story of Monterey’s transformation from a sleepy town of 1,000 into a popular -- and pricey -- tourist destination.

The exhibition begins with “Artist’s Reverie, Dreams at Twilight” (1876), a glorious landscape painted by Jules Tavernier (1844-1889). The 2-by-4-foot canvas depicts the painter seated between a smoldering campfire and an easel on the bank of an inlet. The cloud-striated sky blazes with the last rays of daylight. Silhouettes of cypress and pine trees fill the background, creating a mood of contemplative serenity as the bearded artist smokes a long-stemmed pipe.

The bottle of champagne on Tavernier’s camp table, along with three porcelain plates and the tablecloth, seem out of place in the rustic setting. But they can be explained as symbols of his Frenchness, which includes a touch of Old World eccentricity, especially to pragmatic American eyes.

In any case, this odd detail makes you look more closely at the rest of the image. That’s when things get weird.

Faces appear in rocks. One resembles a sphinx. Trees become contorted monsters. Diaphanous angels emerge from the clouds, and so does a ghostly Native American. And the campfire smoke curls into the shapely form of a translucent woman.

You wonder what Tavernier was smoking, 40 years before Surrealism was born.

His five other landscapes are not nearly as nutty. Combining the casual naturalism and intimacy of the Barbizon School with the crystalline clarity of Caspar David Friedrich’s Romanticism, these luscious oils show Tavernier to be a talented painter with a sharp eye for the texture of his surroundings and a soft spot in his heart for quotidian epiphanies.

He was among the first to turn his back on the majesty of Yosemite and the grandeur of the Sierras in favor of more pastoral, less monumental scenes. His domestically scaled pictures feature solitary hunters, steep coastal crevasses that open onto the ocean, and crumbling Spanish missions.

A cake-decorator-turned-painter, Tavernier worked as an artist-correspondent during the Franco-Prussian war and then as a freelance illustrator of books and magazines in London and New York. Harper’s Weekly sent him West in 1873. The transcontinental railroad had just been finished, in 1869, and Easterners were curious to see what life was like on the Great Plains and beyond.

In 1874, Tavernier set up shop in San Francisco and quickly became the highest-paid painter in California. He lived in Monterey from 1875 to 1878, where his reputation as a tempestuous bohemian who painted with both hands, often without brushes, won him equal parts fame and scorn.

Tavernier made steady money teaching. He also enjoyed the patronage of the state’s most prestigious clients, including Gov. Leland Stanford, who purchased “Point Lobos, Monterey” (1877), the most apocalyptic of the Tavernier paintings in the show. But the artist’s ample income was no match for his lavish lifestyle. Perennially on the run from creditors, he died of chronic alcoholism in his Honolulu studio when he was 45, after selling works to the king of Hawaii and various sugar barons.

In 1880, a rail line connecting Monterey to the main line in Castroville was completed, and twice-daily service to San Francisco began. (The trip took 3 1/2 hours.) The same year, the Hotel Del Monte, a 500-guest luxury hotel on 7,000 acres of prime ocean-front property, opened. Suddenly, artists who pitched tents or slept in the local tavern’s back room were not Monterey’s only visitors.

Wealthy tourists poured in, sustaining a market for landscape paintings. More artists moved in. Many exploited the opportunity to sell kitschy souvenirs to visitors.

Yet some made first-rate works, not groundbreaking masterpieces but fascinating paintings that remain captivating, curious, compelling.

In any case, gentrification set in, the pretense toward tastefulness followed and little room was left for the outlandish wackiness of a maverick like Tavernier.

The exhibition, organized by Scott A. Shields, chief curator of Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, admirably captures the wobbly dynamics of an art scene’s birth, maturation and demise. It’s a three-step process: freewheeling experimentation, substantial innovation, degeneration into formulaic cliches. The process matches the transformation of Monterey from sleepy outpost to tourist destination to elite resort.

The artists who made names for themselves in Monterey at the end of the 19th century followed Tavernier’s turn away from overblown sublimity to human-scaled intimacy. Yet great diversity marks the best works, which include William Keith’s hallucinatory Realism, Charles Rollo Peters’ haunting nocturnes, Arnold Genthe’s theatrical photographs, Francis McComas’ Spartan watercolors, Gottardo Piazzoni’s near-abstractions, Arthur Mathews’ subdued Tonalism and M. Evelyn McCormick’s quirky fusion of Impressionism and Photo-Realism. Each of these artists, like Tavernier, is represented by four to eight works, making up 44 of the show’s 89 pieces. It’s the heart and soul of the exhibition.

Works by 30 other artists add flesh and depth as well as points of contrast. Leon Trousset’s saccharine-sweet picture of Father Junipero Serra celebrating mass in Monterey is a cheesy piece of propaganda that looks silly today. Arthur Vachell’s small images of seagulls too closely resemble works by paint-by-number hobbyists to hold their own. Elizabeth Strong’s meticulously crafted pictures of deer and fawns, cows and calves are so naive they give new meaning to “doe-eyed sentimentality.” There’s even a painting of the Old Carmel Mission on a whale’s vertebra, by John Sykes, which emphasizes just how hokey small-town art can be.

Of the eight featured artists, five were not born in the United States. Monterey attracted Tavernier from France, Keith from Scotland, Genthe from Germany, McComas from Tasmania and Piazzoni from Switzerland. Its second-tier artists were equally international, hailing from Canada, England, Ireland, Mexico and Norway, as well as the U.S., France and Germany.

“Artists at Continent’s End” is accompanied by a wonderfully readable and terrifically informative catalog that sets the historical record straight. In the past, most accounts overlooked work made on the Monterey Peninsula and claimed that an art scene did not take shape there until after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, when artists fled the decimated city.

The truth is far more colorful, as is the cast of characters whose peripatetic adventures made it happen.

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‘Artists at Continent’s End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875-1907’

Where: Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Oct. 1

Price: $10 adults; free for children younger than 12

Contact: (949) 494-8971; www.lagunaartmuseum.org