Charles Christian Nahl

Charles Christian Nahl painted the California Gold Rush from the inside: miners at work and at play, frontier towns, Sunday gatherings and dramatic episodes on the road west. His pictures are detailed, busy and full of character, and they are among the best visual records of the era.

He was born in Kassel in Germany and trained there, then worked in Paris before emigrating to New York in 1848. In 1849 he joined the rush to California, but the mine he bought turned out to be worthless, so he turned back to art. He worked in Sacramento and then San Francisco, often with his half brother Arthur, as a painter and illustrator. His best known painting, Sunday Morning in the Mines (1872), is in the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.

Incident on the Chagres River (1850) shows travellers crossing Panama on the way to California, a journey many gold seekers made.