Samuel Marsden Brookes was born in Middlesex, England, in 1816 to a Dutch family. His father was a botanist and nursery owner. In 1833, he uprooted the family and moved to Chicago.
Despite his father’s lack of encouragement, as a teenager, Samuel Brookes sought to be an artist. He began copying portraits painted by traveling artists. By his mid-twenties, he had earned enough as a fledging painter to finance a stay in Europe with his new wife. There, he copied masterpieces in London galleries, disdaining any formal instruction. After a year, the self-taught artist returned to the United States and launched his career. He mainly painted portraits of influential persons, including Indian chiefs.
He moved to San Francisco around 1862. He expanded the scope of his painting to depict landscapes, still lifes, and various other subjects. In 1865, Brookes helped to organize the California Art Union and went on to be a founding member of the San Francisco Art Association. He was in the right place at the right time. As historian Kevin Starr has noted, “The 1870s were emerging as a golden age of landscape painting in the Far West, and the Athens of this golden age was San Francisco.”
The city’s artistic renaissance was bolstered by a newly formed organization chartered in 1872 called the Bohemian Club. Its founding members were mainly journalists, although Samuel Brookes was also a founder. Many of his fellow artists joined the club in ensuing years and became known as “Bohemian artists.” Brookes himself looked the part, with his large head, long hair and beard, and a cigar always clenched between his teeth.
Influential leaders from many walks of life were quick to join, and today the Bohemian Club remains a citadel of the wealthy and powerful. In mid-July each year, the Bohemian Grove hosts a two-week assemblage of some of the most powerful people in the world at its gathering place, a redwood grove in the town of Monte Rio near Guerneville.
In the 1880s, many notable artists gathered at Brookes’s studio, which he shared with another famed painter, Edward Deakin. (The de Young Museum today displays a famous Deakin painting of Samuel Brookes at work in his ramshackle studio.)
Brookes became renowned for his meticulously detailed paintings of flowers, fruit, birds, and especially fish, often in cascading arrangements. He is still considered one of America’s finest still-life specialists.
The reason for his interest in fish is not readily apparent. His fish paintings are very distinctive, with muted metallic colorations. Many display fish clustered together, either hanging from a string or just on a table. He typically featured trout, salmon, steelhead, and smelt.
One of his paintings is of a trout species no longer found in California — the Dolly Varden, which later would be renamed the bull trout. In choosing this fish, Brookes highlighted a native trout that lived a precarious existence in only one of our state’s waterways — the icy McCloud River.
Samuel Marsden Brookes died in 1892, in San Francisco, after having gained national fame for his skill as an artist.
I am indebted to William E. Miesse for the above on many counts. He had the practiced eye and good fortune to spot and purchase the Samuel Marsden Brookes painting of the Dolly Varden at an auction house in Oakland in 2006. He then expertly photographed the painting for reproduction here. William E. Miesse is the author of Sudden and Solitary: Mount Shasta and Its Artistic Legacy, 1841–2008, published by Heyday Books.
