Schneider Museum of Art
Portrait of an unidentified Chinese
couple by Peter Britt
Portrait of Toy Kee by Peter Britt
The Vanishing (continued: Page 6)
More About Peter Britt
His images stand out for their technical excellence and beyond that for their emotional content. As with all great portrait painters and photographers, he reveals the soul of his subjects and in order to be able to imbue his images with the empathy and respect we find in his work, he, as the artist, must have felt such feelings for his subjects. This sensitivity and consideration was not only unusual, but far and above the “normal” capabilities of his contemporaries.
In Alan Clark Miller's book about Peter Britt, “Photographer Of A Frontier: The Photographs of Peter Britt” he says, “Britt who first arrived in Southern Oregon with $5.00 in his pocket, had financed his fledgling studio through the high risk ventures of mining and mule packing. A later and more profitable pursuit was his practice of lending money. In this, he filled a void left by Jacksonville’s bank which, allegedly, never made a loan in its history. Acreage was the usual security, but one chattel mortgage offered a ‘bay mule named Jenny and one black mule named Mag.’
An unusual aspect of these financial affairs was Britt’s favored relationship with the Chinese community which in 1874 numbered more than 600 in Jackson County. Most merchants treated the ‘Celestials’ with contempt and refused their business. The local press made frequent racial slurs and lobbied for a ‘head tax’ on Orientals.
Britt seems to have felt much sympathy for the so-called ‘Celestials.’ He probably realized early that their successes in the gold mines were more the result of hard work than of secret techniques. In time, Britt took many pictures of the Chinese and seemed to have gained their respect. In all of Jacksonville, only Britt and one other man, a lawyer named Wesley Kahler, seemed to have any sympathy for these pariahs. For his part, Britt allowed a Chinese company to mine on his property in the 1850’s in return for a portion of the profits. He gave grubstakes to Chinese miners in the following decades when they took over abandoned gold claims. He became a landlord to several Chinese families, keeping a special rent book for their signatures, and permitted Chinese to live in several shanties on his own property.”
More than 150 years after a nearly broke Swiss immigrant arrived in a muddy mining camp, his legacy lives through the pictures he took, the gardens he planted, and a vital agricultural heritage he helped to foster.
The Vanishing Page 1 The Vanishing Page 2 (Rene Yung)
The Vanishing Page 3 (Hung Liu) The Vanishing Page 4 (More about Hung Liu)
The Vanishing Page 5 (Peter Britt)
