Updated:
October 14, 2006
rank Miller was not alone in his fascination with the California Missions. Artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, including Englishman Edwin Deakin (1838-1923), Henry Chapman Ford (1828-1894), and Alexander Harmer (1856-1925), left invaluable likenesses of the Missions, and their artworks serve as important historical records. Miller acquired thirty-eight of Ford’s mission paintings around 1911-1915. Miller exhibited the paintings in an area of the hotel basement now known as the Catacombs; he named the space El Camino Real (the Royal or Kings Highway), modeled after the road along which the twenty-one California missions are located. The Ford paintings do not include all twenty-one California missions. Ford had a studio in Santa Barbara for many years, and several of the thirty-six paintings that still remain in the Mission Inn's collection feature the Santa Barbara Mission.
Ford’s paintings were based on his own observations and the work of earlier artists, even photographers. The Mission Inn Handbook (Hutchings, 1951)(p.28)states:
Realizing that (the missions) were rapidly decaying, and that in a few years much of the material part of them would be gone forever, (Ford) devoted much time to making sketches in watercolors and studies of them in oil.
Although Ford produced many etchings of the missions, the Mission Inn has the only known collection of his paintings. In 1991, fire destroyed a second Ford collection in Oakland, California.
Mildew, insects, and other factors damaged many artifacts housed in the Mission Inn's Catacombs over the years, and Henry Chapman Ford’s paintings required extensive restoration. In their ongoing effort to support the Inn and its treasures, the Friends of the Mission Inn generously funded the restoration of these irreplaceable paintings.
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