Virginia City sojourn

Mining Mountains (1933) by Margaret Bruton
From If Pictures Could Talk: Stories About California Paintings in Our Collection by James L. Coran and Walter A. Nelson-Rees (Oakland: WIM, 1989)

In the spring of 1933, the Bruton sisters traveled to Virginia City, Nevada, home of the Comstock lode. This former mining town flourished during the Gold Rush and at its peak was home to 25,000 residents. When the Brutons visited, it had been reduced to just a few hundred inhabitants. Nevada had legalized gambling in 1931, which attracted tourists and visitors, but California artists flocked to Nevada’s ghost towns for a change of scenery and new inspiration for their art. Virginia City “would capture the attention and imagination of artists, writers, and travelers that were interested in America’s Old West, or were looking for a quiet refuge to conduct their work.”¹   

Virginia City’s well preserved historic buildings, abandoned mines, and dramatic landscape made it an appealing locale for sketching and painting. As Helen recalled, Virginia City “was really at a very interesting stage… you could buy a house if you wanted to, just pull it down for firewood, for $25, but if you wanted a real substantial house you might have to pay $150 or $200. We didn’t buy one unfortunately. But we had a wonderful time. It was a very fertile period, we were there for about five or six months.”² The Brutons were not the only California artists to travel to Virginia City. Art critics from the period mention that “others of the East Bay [art] group”³ spent time in the mining town. In fact, by 1935, critics were complaining that the subject of deserted mining towns was “a vein which now seems to be about exhausted, if not actually overworked.”⁴

Main Street - Gold Hill  by Margaret Bruton

Upon their return to California, the sisters displayed their Virginia City paintings in a watercolor exhibition at Gump’s Galleries in San Francisco.  The critic from the Oakland Tribune remarked that the Brutons could make even a ghost town look cheerful: “even the old Virginia City ruins … do not make you sad, as ruins ought to do. Something of the richness and joy of Virginia City in its prime still clings to them.”⁵ Esther’s painting Mansion in Ruins won third place in the competition.  In October of 1934, Margaret’s painting Comstock Lode was exhibited at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. One critic said it was “the best painting I have seen of the many that have come from brushes of artists who have haunted Virginia City for the last few years. It is a picture that grows on you as only a sound work can.”⁶ Her watercolor Mining Mountain won a first prize of $100 at the Oakland Art Gallery’s annual exhibition and first prize at the Sacramento State Fair. This piece, which was later reworked into an oil painting, was one of Margaret’s favorites, and it hung proudly in her Monterey home for many years. 

Margaret Bruton in her home, with Mining Mountains in the background
Monterey Peninsula Herald, 18 Dec. 1977, p. C-1

Margaret eventually sold Mining Mountains to the collectors James Coran and Walter Nelson-Rees--this was yet another fine work by the Brutons destroyed in the Oakland Fire of 1991.

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¹www.westernmininghistory.com/towns/nevada/virginia-city1/

²Oral history interview with Helen and Margaret Bruton, 1964 December 4. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

³Glenn Wessels.  The Argonaut, 27 Apr. 1934.

⁴Junius Cravens.  San Francisco News, 20 Apr. 1935.

⁵H.L. Dungan, Oakland Tribune, 13 Jan. 1935, p. S-7.

⁶H.L. Dungan.  Oakland Tribune, 21 Oct. 1934, p. 8-S.