The title of John Ott’s book, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority, is a riff on Sarah Burns’s important Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Ott covers much the same ground chronologically as Burns and with the same high ambitions. But while Burns’s focus is a traditional one on the artist as the maker of meaning, Ott turns his attention to the patron.

Ott argues that for the most part Americanists have labored in the shadow of Thorstein Veblen as they have looked at the buyers and consumers of art: in Veblen’s terms, the motive for purchasing art is satisfied with the desire for conspicuous display. Even Pierre Bourdieu’s more expansive notions of art consumption as an accumulation of social capital limit an understanding of the cultural work that patronage can assume. While Ott rejects neither Veblen nor Bourdieu, he wants to analyze patronage’s production of meaning with the same intensity and seriousness as is typically given the intention of the artist. But Ott pushes beyond arguments concerning the “death of the author.” He would argue that “the demands of patrons are a precondition for artistic production” (6; emphasis in original), not only for individual works and acts of patronage but also as a “managerial project of cultural hegemony” (9), one that is never entirely successful and always incomplete.

Ott describes the concerns of Americanists of the last generation as largely focused on race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Where class enters the equation, scholars have considered working-class populations. Ott instead looks at elites and recognizes “cultural leadership as a kind of performance” (7) that is historically situated and, in his words, “manufactured” (7). More specifically, he turns his attention to corporate capitalists—those in charge of actual manufacturing—and the discourses of industrialization after the Civil War, a period of enormous social and cultural change brought on by new technologies yoked to new scales of industrialization, both fully harnessed by corporations (a nod to another classic study, Alan Trachtenberg’s Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).

The final refinements of Ott’s argument consist of his subjects; he is principally concerned with four industrialists and one wife: the Central Pacific Railroad executives Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, Mark A. Hopkins, and Jane Stanford, all of them also Californians. There’s a certain danger of provincialization in this last choice, or at least, as Ott wryly suggests, of not being taken seriously by the thoroughly East Coast and New York bias of the Americanist field (note that Burns does not need to specify that she is inventing the New York and Boston modern artist). But he fully justifies his choices. The railroad industry constituted the core of industrial and corporate economic might in this period (in the 1920s and 1930s he might have looked at Henry Ford and other Detroit magnates). California in many ways most dramatically witnessed the changes brought by the railroad within twenty years of statehood, including the instant and burgeoning urbanization of San Francisco and the development of cultural institutions to match the city, as well as the most intense immigration and nativist debates, brought on by the importation of Chinese laborers to build the railroads and the equivocal relationship of modern California to its Mexican and Spanish past. The East Coast was old by comparison, and the cultural and economic changes created in the post-Civil War period worked within historical constraints that new-minted California did not experience. Moreover, as Ott points out, it is hard to call Albert Bierstadt and Eadweard Muybridge provincial, or not nationally consequential, along with James Jackson Jarves, Mark Twain, and a host of other cultural figures.

This tight focus produces excitingly close and complex readings of works and events, offering new insights into well-known objects and actions. At the same time, if there is a weakness in the book, it is produced by the same tight focus. Ott, for example, wants to give Leland and Jane Stanford credit for being complex human beings, with both self-serving and noble motives, mixed and sometimes in conflict with each other. But, in truth, neither Stanford really comes alive as a multi-faceted figure. Think of the contrast with Charles Freer who, whatever his motives might have been initially, became through his collecting deeply fascinated with Buddhism, a genuine seeker after spiritual truth (see Kathleen Pyne’s Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). Ott’s book begins with an image of J. P. Morgan magnetically attracting across the Atlantic the treasures and bric-a-brac of Europe with his dollars, followed by a cartoon of Andrew Carnegie and his libraries. It would have been nice to see these patrons beyond the caricatures of them, and they serve only as prompts for the discussion, never to appear again. Neither Morgan nor Carnegie, however, was much of a patron of living artists, and it is this patronage, not just the collecting of art, that most concerns Ott. And this is what brings the book to life: the cut and thrust of patronage, of clients’ demands and artists’ resistance (or easy acquiescence, as in the case of Charles Christian Nahl), and patronage resoundingly resisted by those whom it is supposed to benefit. Abiding within the circumscribed boundaries of his project, Ott succeeds in making major contributions not just as a patronage study, but also in regard to how works of art are produced and disseminated and understood in this period, how visual systems are created and the work they do, how museums grow, and so on. The book becomes an essential monograph for understanding how American visual culture is created and performs in this period.

The book focuses on four case studies, but before Ott gets to these he analyses the development of an ideology of patronage in the period, primarily through the writings of Jarves, which he contrasts with Ambrose Bierce’s skeptical and antagonistic views of these social elites. These two voices emerge in the context of a pair of incidents in Stanford’s patronage: a text in which Stanford tries to articulate the value of art for the public, and his threats to Thomas Hill if the artist should ever exhibit The Last Spike (1881), a gigantic painting initially commissioned by Stanford and tightly supervised by him but then disowned. In a second chapter, Ott offers a fascinating account of the development of art institutions in San Francisco, that is to say, the institutional framework for these opposing ideologies. The story of The What Cheer House and Woodward’s Gardens, an amenity-rich thousand-room hostel for working men and a public pleasure garden (which had an art gallery within fifteen years of the Gold Rush), was entirely unknown to me, as were the other nascent art institutions of San Francisco. The contrast between them and the mansions of Hopkins and Stanford on Nob Hill could not have been greater, and this detailed history is a very valuable addition to the history of the development of the art museum in the United States.

The first case study concerns Stanford and Muybridge. Asking what Stanford wanted from the study of horse locomotion and how he shaped it and its reception, Ott argues that Stanford stressed the mechanical action of the camera, and that the action of horses and locomotives were in his mind similarly mechanical. In contrast, a number of viewers resisted this equation, along with the larger point Stanford wished to make—that industrialization was a public good, especially if he controlled it. At stake, as Ott demonstrates, was “the ability to claim social authority through the very practice of representation” (15). The next case study takes this further with an analysis of a landscape painting commissioned from Bierstadt by Huntington. Ott draws a convincing parallel between the managerial vision of Huntington, which Bierstadt accommodates, and the proliferation of panoramic photographs of San Francisco, a “pictorial Haussmanization” (15) as Ott calls it: both made a public argument for a mechanistic view of terrain, one best managed by such titans as Huntington, Hopkins, and Stanford. The next two studies examine paintings by Nahl of the Gold Rush and Mexican Californios, commissioned by Crocker, and demonstrate the ways Crocker, together with Nahl, attempted to rewrite the history of the state in order to rationalize the control of entrepreneurial elites. While certainly a regional history, Ott examines the way such “local color” is part of a national trend: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), the best-selling novel that revived interest in the California missions across the country, was written in New York City. Ott then examines the uses that Mission style was put to by Jane Stanford in her creation of Stanford University: a Catholic institution, hitherto read as repressive and obscurantist, becomes valorized as a heroic effort to missionarize the indigenous population, just as modern education would improve young Anglos. Finally, in a short coda, he examines the reception of Jean-Francois Millet’s Man with a Hoe (1860–62), bought by the Crockers and now in the Getty Museum, which careened between the Crocker’s happy view of their cultural philanthropy and a dyspeptic reading of the painting as representing the beaten-down worker in a state dominated by men such as Crocker.

By ending with Millet, Ott wants readers to consider the larger national and even international resonance of the patronage of the Central Pacific executives. Ott has much to say about how cultural developments in late nineteenth-century America are understood, and his is a consistently illuminating and bracing corrective of a good deal of received wisdom. The book inevitably asks readers to think about relationships between a patron and a work of art in the broadest terms. Italian Renaissance studies are perfectly at home in focusing on patronage: all those popes and cardinals and family chapels, Medici merchants and their allegorical paintings, laymen (and women) and their private devotional needs. Ott makes it clear that scholars need to normalize such concerns in the field. Projecting forward, he also implicitly makes us wonder if there is something distinctly California about Stanford’s relationship to a resistant public: I am thinking of the philanthropist Eli Broad’s public missteps, for example.

Conversely, Ott sometimes characterizes events as trends that I suspect are limited in duration. The oppositions he points to, between those who wished for a genuinely communal art culture and elites who wanted a top-down philanthropy and access to art, are perhaps a typical American dynamic, one that oscillates between these two poles, with one having the upper-hand and then the other. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the patronage of industrialists, one might consider the production of art in the 1930s, and also the development of community art centers in the 1960s and 1970s. I would also like to have seen developed the contrast between those who primarily consumed contemporary art and those who collected older art. I suspect that this, too, is in part a chronological issue. If the Stanfords had been twenty years younger, would they have collected old master paintings instead, like Morgan? Or is this just the difference between a railroad executive and a banker (although Crocker bought a good group of old master drawings)? Most collectors seem to collect for only a limited period, perhaps ten years or so. Very few collect their whole adult lives: either the walls fill up, or they move onto something else (yachts, say), or they remain fixated on the group of artists with whom they first fell in love. It would be interesting to see what a diachronic study of the Stanford’s collecting would look like: did it occur most fully at a particular passage in Stanford’s career, after he had made his fortune but before all the honors had come in? Or a study of his full collection: I will never forget the white stuffed owl in the Leland Stanford Jr. room of the Stanford University Art Museum. Is there more of that type of object, and how does it relate to the Muybridge commission, for example?

One thing is for certain, Ott’s book is a worthy successor to Burns’s study, and it should have a similarly galvanizing effect on the field.