City left in uproar over painter’s work
In 1875, San Francisco went wild over a painting of a dead Arthurian maiden.
Thousands flocked to see the artwork during its brief exhibition. When it was stolen, city residents reacted as if a beloved friend had been abducted. When it was recovered, the whole town rejoiced.
A number of factors came together to produce the furor over “Elaine.” First, by the 1870s, San Francisco was ripe for high culture. The oncebrawling frontier town had grown more civilized, in large part because it was less male. The proportion of “respectable” women had soared from less than 10 percent in the early 1850s to 40 percent by 1870. San Franciscans began to take an interest in cultural and educational institutions such as the San Francisco Art Association, which was organized in 1871.
The fact that “Elaine” was painted by a native son also contributed to the mania that resulted from its theft.
Toby Rosenthal was born in Strassburg, Prussia, in 1848 and moved here with his fami-
ly when he was 10. As Birgitta Hjalmarson writes in “Artful Players: Artistic Life in Early San Francisco,” Rosenthal’s artistic talents were recognized early. His father, a tailor who had a shop on what is now Grant Avenue near Broadway, scraped together the money to send him to study in Munich.
Rosenthal’s paintings there included “Affection’s Last Offering,” which depicted villagers mourning a dead child lying in a Bavarian farmhouse. It was one of the hits of the 1868 Mechanics’ Fair, stoking San Franciscans’ pride that a local boy was becoming a big name in the art world.
Then came “Elaine.” It depicted a scene from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s tragic Arthurian poem “Lancelot and Elaine,” the tale of how the maiden Elaine died of unrequited love for the knight of the Round Table. Rosenthal’s painting shows Elaine’s body being carried to Camelot on a funeral barge.
Even before “Elaine” came to San Francisco, a torrent of advance publicity had whipped up interest. On March 28, 1875, The Chronicle ran a long bio piece that focused on the painter’s humble upbringing. After gushing that Rosenthal’s father “is blessed above all other tailors, for his name has a well earned chance of living in history,” the writer raved. “It is not once in a century that so young a man rises to such a position in art.”
Other stories described how “Elaine” had been commissioned, who the models were, how a crown prince had bid for the painting, and so on. Elaine clubs were formed and an Elaine waltz was written. There were even Elaine cigars.
When the painting arrived at the Snow & May gallery on Kearny Street on March 30, hundreds of people were lined up to see it. Admission was 25 cents, with the proceeds going to charity. Some viewers broke into tears at the sight of the dead Elaine, who was holding a lily in one hand and a letter to Lancelot in the other. After three days, 8,773 people had seen the painting.
But the city’s highminded rapture was rudely interrupted. When the crowd entered the gallery on the morning of April 2, they were stunned to see an empty frame. Thieves had entered the gallery in the night, cut out the canvas and gotten away. “Elaine” was gone.
The press covered it like an actual kidnapping. “Alas! Elaine,” the Alta moaned. Under the headline, “Farewell, Sweet Sister,” The Chronicle mourned, “All who heard the news felt a pang as if they had lost a muchbeloved friend.”
Hundreds gathered to look at the empty frame, tears were shed, and “the hands of ancient ladies were raised in holy horror.” The authorities speculated that “some person of diseased imagination may have carried it off to be the constant companion of his lonely house.”
The painting’s owner, apparently inspired by the work’s medieval spirit, opined that the thieves should be “hanged, drawn and quartered” or “broken on the wheel.”
San Francisco’s most famous detective, police Capt. Isaiah Lees, was assigned to the case. He quickly got a break. As William B. Secrest writes in “Dark and Tangled Threads of Crime: San Francisco’s Famous Police Detective, Isaiah W. Lees,” a man came to Lees’ office and told him he had seen several suspicious characters in front of the gallery the evening “Elaine” was stolen.
When Lees pulled out his book of mug shots, the man identified one of the suspicious characters as a notorious miscreant named William Donahue, known as “Cut Face” because of a long scar down his left cheek.
At 2 a.m. on Sunday, April 4, police burst into a rooming house on Third Street and arrested three of Donahue’s cronies, then quickly rounded up Donahue himself. He confessed and took police to a shanty on Langton Street in the South of Market, where he pointed to a bed in the corner. Under a pile of old clothes, Lees found “Elaine,” undamaged, in a roll of material labeled, “Custom House Official Maps.”
When the painting was briefly displayed to the public on a table at City Hall, so many people lined up to see it that the Bulletin newspaper wrote, “The scene was suggestive of the remains of some illustrious departed lying in state.”
A few days later, “Elaine” was moved back to Snow & May. Next to it, the gallery installed a large photograph of her knight in shining armor, Capt. Lees. By the time the exhibition had ended, more than 10,000 people had viewed the painting.
Rosenthal died in 1917, having lived most of his life in Munich, where he married a banker’s daughter and executed large commissions for European and American patrons.
It wasn’t exactly cutting-edge stuff, and the art world moved on. “Elaine” ended up in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, but the artist hailed as a once-ina-century genius has been almost completely forgotten.