A view of US and British navy ships from the California Gold Rush sketchbook sold at Chiswick Auctions for £16,000.
The 76-page document records the places and characters seen by the amateur artist and adventurer Joseph Goldsborough Bruff (1804-89) as part of a ‘49ers’ expedition to California from 1849-51.
Brought to Chiswick by a private vendor in June, it sailed past its estimate of £2000-3000 to sell to the book trade on August 4. The auction house believes it was bought on behalf of an institution.
Goldsborough Bruff, born in Washington, DC, had briefly attended the military academy at West Point but was forced to leave after a duel. Instead, he found work as an itinerant seaman and latterly as a draftsman and cartographer.
A scene in the Sierra Nevada, one of the watercolours and drawings from the California Gold Rush sketchbook sold at Chiswick Auctions for £16,000.
Following the news that gold had been found in the West, he organised the Washington City and California Mining Association and an expedition to follow the Lassen Trail. After his party disbanded, Bruff spent a testing winter in the Sierra Nevadas before visiting California’s gold country, making drawings of geographic landmarks, mining camps and scenes which piqued his interest.
The many signed and annotated drawings in this 8 x 10in (19 x 26cm) sketchbook with its worn but original quarter morocco binding correspond closely with those held by the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
A portrait of George Waller Vesey, Royal Tyrone Militia, one of the watercolours and drawings from the California Gold Rush sketchbook sold at Chiswick Auctions for £16,000.
It includes 17 portraits, nine maritime and coastal scenes plus other studies, the names and places of which are mentioned throughout Bruff’s journal published by Columbia University Press in 1949. Some additional costume and South American scenes in the book are signed by one WH Gatliff – a reference to another competent watercolourist Bruff met while in the West Indies.
In Bruff’s diary entry dated February 13, 1849, Trinidad, he wrote: “Clear and cool. Made the acquaintance of Dr Gatliff, a graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, and a talented artist. We walked together and made some sketches. “
Collections of Bruff’s work are held by the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Huntington, Yale University Library and the Smithsonian. Although sketches do occasionally come up for auction, the saleroom could find no records for a similar cache of material relating to the Gold Rush.
