Paul Frenzeny's Chinatown Sketches: An Artist's Fascination with San Francisco's Chinese Quarter, 1874-1882
San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 2012. Limited edition. Hardcover. Thin folio [37 cm] 1/4 floral patterned cloth with tan paper over boards and a printed paper title label on the front cover. Pictorial endpapers. The underlying boards are exposed at the bottom fore-edge corners of the covers. Very good. Item #59052
ISBN: 9780981959740
One in an edition limited to four hundred and twenty-five copies. This copy is not numbered.
From the foreword-
"Claudine Chalmers' book Paul Frenzeny's Chinatown Sketches revives our interest in an almost-forgotten era when artists were employed for illustrating printed media. It also brings us back to the nineteenth-century American West, where even in times of economic prosperity, the presence of Chinese workers outraged a predominantly white population that became determined to drive them out and prohibit any further immigration from China...
"Frenzeny's sketches executed for Harper's Weekly and Harper's Monthly during that time were not tainted by the demeaning caricatures drawn by the prevailing anti-Chinese environment- he neither attacked nor defended the Chinese but illustrated and wrote what he saw, such was his objectivity. Unfortunately, his unbiased observations did not have an impact on the public but were drowned in a sea of sinophobia. Readers of this book, however, will have the advantage of viewing Frenzeny's sketches all in one volume, and they will be able to appreciate different points of view on 'the Chinese Question.'"
Price: $100.00