Virginia City, N.T.

San Francisco: C.C. Kuchel, 1864. Lithograph. Small loss to the blank area below the lower left hand corner of the central image. A detailed bird's-eye view of Virginia City, Nevada Territory, during its silver mining boom by Grafton Tyler Brown, one of the first African American artists to depict California and the Pacific Coast.

This 1864 lithograph by Grafton Tyler Brown offers a detailed bird's-eye view of Virginia City, Nevada Territory, during its silver mining boom. The city was the heart of the Comstock Lode, one of the richest silver discoveries in American history, attracting thousands of prospectors and fueling rapid urban development. (truncated) Brown created two different editions of this 1864 view, one with images of 15 buildings across the top and 18 buildings below the central bird's eye view and the present edition with vignettes surrounding the central image showing 9 important mills: Ophir, Woodworth, Gould & Curry, Potosi, Bullion, Mexican, Chollar, and Savage. Brown was a pioneering African American artist, lithographer, and entrepreneur. Born in Pennsylvania in 1841, Brown moved to San Francisco in the late 1850s and apprenticed under the German-born lithographer Charles Conrad Kuchel. In 1864, he established his own firm, G.T. Brown & Co., becoming the first African American to own a lithography business on the West Coast. His firm produced city views, maps, and promotional prints that documented the rapid expansion of settlements across California, Nevada, and the Pacific Northwest. As one of the few 19th-century African American artists to achieve professional recognition in America, Brown's work serves as both an artistic achievement and a historical record of the landscapes and communities shaped by westward expansion. His later career took him to Canada and Montana, where he focused on landscape painting, further cementing his legacy as a significant figure in American art and print culture.

Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America (1984), p. 166; Mihaly, "A Trailblazing African American Artist and Printer," in Verso, The Huntington Library, Feb. 2025. (Inventory #: 41913)