Oct 02, 2012 - Sale 2287
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Sale 2287 - Lot 138

Price Realized: $ 7,800
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
(CALIFORNIA.) [Beutler, John B.] Five original sketches of early Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. Pencil, ink, and wash on paper; various sizes up to 7 x 17 inches; various conditions, with moderate wear and foxing to the edges of the two main drawings. [San Francisco, circa 1853-64]
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Additional Details

These evocative drawings were done by John Baptist Beutler (1824-1874) circa 1853. He was best known as a singer and music teacher, but was an accomplished caricaturist on the side. At least one of his related drawings was published: "Chinese Life!!! Dupont Street", issued as a lithograph letter sheet by Fishbourne & Co. circa 1851 to 1855 (see Peters, California on Stone, #61 and page 121). Just a single example is known to survive, at the Bancroft Library.
The present drawings are very similar in style and subject to "Chinese Life!!!" One of them, a completed drawing in ink and wash (8 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches), depicts 20 Chinese men around a gaming table; one of them in the foreground holds a lit opium pipe. Another completed pencil drawing (7 x 17 inches on two sheets conjoined with tape) shows an even larger crowd around a gaming table, with a group of musicians in the foreground and four women gathered in the doorway to the left. Also included in this lot are three related rough pencil and ink sketches, each about 4 x 7 inches and completed on both sides. The drawings, while slightly comical, strive for realism and are at least somewhat sympathetic to their subjects. Any visual documentation of Chinatown from this early period is quite scarce, and these drawings are accomplished and attractive.
Beutler was born in Freiburg, Germany, married in New York in 1851, lived in San Francisco in 1853 and 1854 (where he helped launch the state's wine industry), returned to New York through at least 1861, and then was in the San Francisco area again until his death in 1874. See the WPA History of Music in San Francisco: Early Master Teachers, pages 120-1. These drawings were found on the East Coast among a cache of Beutler's New York sketches (see lot 331), and their close resemblance to Beutler's "Chinese Life" makes their attribution beyond doubt.