Introducing The Buck Collection

Sublime Wonderlands Focusing on idealized representations of the North American wilderness, Sublime Wonderlands examines long-lasting associations of the American landscape with rugged beauty, limitless resources, and national pride. Assembling a selection of over forty landscape paintings spanning the late 1800s to the 1980s and ranging in style from American Romanticism to contemporary abstraction, the paintings […]

The first mission in what is now the state of California was founded in San Diego by Spanish Franciscan friars in 1769. Over the next fifty years, Spanish missionaries established a total of 21 missions throughout California. They were connected by El Camino Real, also called the Royal Road or the King’s Highway. By 1850, when California became the 31st state of the Union, many of the missions had been abandoned and were in ruins. It wasn’t until the 1890s, when artists began portraying the missions as relics of California’s cultural past that a serious effort was made to preserve and restore them.