Very few artists attending art school in California in the 1920s were interested in the lush, romantic landscape painting that had dominated California art for the previous thirty years. Instead, they looked to the work by California artists dating back to the period of 1850 to 1880, when the state was forming. Some of the most interesting capture daily routines in the gold mining camps and street scenes in busy downtown San Francisco in the 1870s. Those works alongside the art of George Bellows and the Ash Can School served as inspiration for a new generation of artists interested in taking California art in another direction.
