San Francisco

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Gold is the color of the California dream, as Frost, who was born in San Francisco and lived there as a child, certainly knew. Early Spanish explorers came looking for gold and found that the barren dunes of the Bay Area desolated their "heart(s) with unutterable gloom." They were perhaps the first and only visitors to be so affected. The poet Dylan Thomas's response on his first sight of the City in 1950 is more typical. "But oh, San Francisco!" he wrote to his wife Caitlin, "It is and has everything. . . . The wonderful sunlight . . ., the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes. Beautiful Chinatown. Every race in the world."Each generation has produced painters to interpret San Francisco's unique natural setting and pungent ethnic mix. Some of the best examples of their work are collected on these pages - 150 years of history through artists' eyes.Forty full-color images include a wide range of George Burgess's cityscape from the days just after the goldrush; William Coulter's depiction of the Cliff House and Seal Rocks in the Gay Nineties; Edwin Deakin's Despair, after the 1906 earthquake and fire; Yun Gee's vision of Chinatown in the late 1920s; Lee Blair's more-perfect-than-a-postcard cable car; and a luminous rendering of the City's famous architecture and hills by Wayne Thiebaud.San Francisco is today an eclectic this magnet for social protesters is also a conservative banking town wedded to propriety; she is both a coast of hope for poor castoffs and a fertile ground for tight-knit, middle-class immigrant communities; family neighborhoods and enclaves of alternative lifestyle exist side by side. She is called "the City" by any who know her at all, and the City - in memory or imagination - is everybody's favorite place.