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Drawn West: Selections from the Robert B. Honeyman Jr. Collection of Early Californian and Western Art and Americana

Jack von Euw and Genoa Shepley

228 pages (11 x 11)
Cloth, ISBN: 1-890771-92-9, $39.95

Published in collaboration with Bancroft Library Press, University of California, Berkeley

California and the West in the days of exploration and settlement was a region full of adventure, danger, and wonders. And before there were cameras, artists depicted all of it. Colorful images moved beyond the circles of wealth and power and found their way into the popular press, advertising, and every level of commerce—newspapers ran ads, vegetable boxes sported colorful labels, and sheet music was decorated with the images of California. A world that was part real and part fantasy entranced America for generations and Robert Brodhead Honeyman Jr. set out to capture the excitement in an extraordinary collection, unique for its range of material.

The Honeyman Collection could be described formally as a collection of over 2,300 items that focus on the visual interpretation of California and the West from 1790 through the early 1930s. Many of these items are one-of-a-kind objects of unique historical value, some seen here for the first time. However, these descriptions don’t begin to convey the wonderful mix of the collection: the popular prints and lithographs of the day, the finest art of the period, the clipper ship cards, the tons of ephemera depicting lands that comparatively few people had seen. If you wanted to show someone the West of the nineteenth century (without television or other modern media) you would use the rich, colorful Honeyman Collection.

Awards and Reviews:

ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Finalist

Rounce & Coffin Club Western Books Exhibition Selection

"[A] voluptuously tactile book of Occidentalia. It’s the very model of the coffeetablist’s opulent art. …A mouth-watering keepsake."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Drawn West, thematically arranged, offers a healthy balance between serious documents and droll oddities, between art and ephemera."—San Diego Union-Tribune

"If it’s California or Western history and art you seek, look no further than Drawn West."—Midwest Book Review

"Sumptuous."—Metroactive Books

About the Authors:

Jack von Euw is curator of the Pictorial Collection at the Bancroft Library. He is a former archivist for the Smithsonian Institution’s West Coast Regional Office of the Archives of American Art and former curator of the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery.

Genoa Shepley is freelance writer in Tucson, Arizona. She has served as writer/editor for arts organizations including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications.