Alexander Harmer and the Visual Reinvention of Alta California

In 1893, the New Jersey painter Alexander Francis Harmer (1856–1925) moved to Santa Barbara. There, over the next three decades, his paintings and illustrations betrayed complex discourses about Hispanic and Indigenous cultures. Examining works by Harmer in relation to correspondence, photographs, and clippings from the Alexander Francis Harmer Papers and Alexander Francis Harmer Trust Records at the Archives of American Art, this article sheds light on the parameters of his artistic enterprise. It reveals the extent to which the painter and his patrons attempted to reinvent Hispanic and Indigenous heritage in California, manifesting their entanglement in broader state-sanctioned efforts to rewrite regional US histories at the turn of the twentieth century. As such, Harmer’s case interrogates the relationship between historicist art and the archive, as well as the role of white American artists as producers of historical discourses, which sometimes led to omissions and the perpetuation of colonial violence.