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Fortunato Arriola

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Artist's Biography

The son of a once-wealthy Mexican landowner who had fallen on hard times, Fortunato Arriola taught himself to paint portraits in his native country, then moved to California in the early 1860s. He continued to accept portrait commissions as a resident artist in San Francisco, while starting to paint landscapes much in demand in California in the late sixties.  His studio became the center for colorful Mexican politicos in exile and thoughts of Mexico were often in his mind, as evidenced by the many Mexican subjects that he chose to paint.  In 1871, Arriola moved to New York, hoping to make enough money to travel to Europe, but prosperity evaded him, and he boarded the steamship Bienville to return to San Francisco.  Its cargo of gunpowder exploded, the ship sank and the artist was drowned.

As a landscape painter, Arriola belonged to the late Hudson River school, "luminist" tradition of Church, Heade and Kensett, employing the tight pictorial style and poetic use of light favored by these artists. Our work depicts the Sacramento River just after sunset, looking in a southwesterly direction from a point of view near Rio Vista.  In the afterglow of evening light, Mount Diablo is outlined in the center distance.  This work is an earlier version of a painting of this subject praised in the Sacramento Bee of April 22, 1870, as the better of two excellent Sacramento River scenes, "from sketches taken on that stream," exhibited at the short-lived Sacramento Art Union.  "Mrs. P. Clark," to whom the painting is inscribed, may have been the mother of Miss Annie Clark, the sitter for a large 1869 Arriola portrait of a little girl, posed with the Sacramento River in the background, now in the Boggs Collection, Shasta State Historical Park, Shasta, CA.