Perception and Perfection: Picturing the Spanish and Mexican Coastal West

IRIS H. W. ENGSTRAND

European and American artists and illustrators of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries painted or sketched the Pacific coastal region from Mexico to Alaska. They recorded contemporary scenes and native inhabitants and reproduced pictorially the fauna and flora discovered during scientific exploration. These illustrations offer significant insights into an important historical period.
BEFORE THERE WAS POWERPOINT, before DVD, before video, pay-per-view, slides, color prints, black and white photos, before all these forms of photography that we use now as both sources and artifacts to study the past—before all that, the images of our disciplines, and of others, were found in paintings and drawings. Artists and illustrators depicted the past—or the observable present—in pictorial documents that became the records of current events, journalism, of reportage, and of scientific exploration, discovery, and adventure. Some were motivated by purposes of artistic representation—as aesthetic creations—and some of these were so fine and so elegant in their perception that they became works of art. Others were motivated by the need to report observations in the pursuit of science and in the quest for objective truth. Some of these are presently being used in scientific research to determine changing patterns of fauna and flora along the Pacific Coast.	1
Iris H. W. Engstrand Forty-second President of the Western History Association
In either case, these images have captured for posterity the beauty and strangeness of a bygone era. Unfortunately, no significant first-hand images of the interior of the Southwest under Spain or Mexico exist until the time of the U. S.-Mexico War. During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, it was the moment of scientific exploration that brought artists to the Pacific Coast. In the post-1821 period, it is largely foreigners, and the kind of people who carried sketchpads, who seem to have traveled by sea to California and the Pacific Northwest, but not overland to Santa Fe. As David Weber points out, in contrast to the mid-1850s, "no authentic graphic images of the desert Southwest were available to the American public in 1846." For this reason, the coastal West becomes an exceptional place.1	. . .