This is an evolving catalog. It is updated as information becomes available.

Much of the initial information came from the UCLA PhD art history disertation of Robert Ewing from about 1979. This information has been updated and revised by Robert Uzgalis in 2005. He discovered some addional pictures that were not on the original list, contacted museums, and tracked ownership for most of the works. There still may be many more Tavernier sketches, paintings, watercolors, and pastels remaining to be found. Any person, gallery, or museum that believes they have a new Tavernier or Frénzeny item to add please contact us.

Bibliography:

Annals of Bohemia
(originally available to members only —
very limited distribution)
Bohemian Club
San Francisco, CA

vol. 1 1872-80
vol. 2 1880-87
vol. 3 1887-95
vol. 4 1895-1906
vol. 5 1907-1972
vol. 6 1973-1987
vol. 7
vol. 8 1997 Bohemian Art

The Pictorial Record of the Old West
Part I. Frénzeny and Tavernier
Robert Taft
Kansas Historical Quarterly (Vol. 14 No. 1)
Feb. 1946 , pp. 1-35.

This article is the academic basis for the route on the map of the Frénzeny/Tavernier trip across the country. Taft lists many of the Harper's Weekly woodcuts made on the trip and identifies locations.

The Kansas State Historical Society website contains the entire article.

Picturesque America or The Land We Live In
A delineation by Pen and Pencil in Two Volumes
Bryant, William Cullen ed.
D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1874

Vol I.  31×23 cm; viii+548 pp.
Vol II. 31×23 cm; vi+576 pp.

Robert Taft. Painters and Illustrators of the American West: 1850 — 1900. Bonzai Books. New York. 1953.

This is the scholarly publication, in book form, that contains the Kansas State Historical Society articles on Western Painters and Illustrators, ref G above. It forms the background of most of the research on Tavernier and Frénzeny.

Tavernier Images without a Home.

The following images represent pictures with unknown physical description and sufficiently little information that they are not included in the catalog. If anyone knows who owns these pictures or more information about them please contact the museum. We would love to put them in their proper place. The same of course applies for pictures by Tavernier or Frénzeny that are not in either catalog.

Cows along the Russian River (California)

Copyright Issues:

As far as is known, all of Tavernier's paintings were executed by 1889 and were offered for sale to the general public before 1978, so the Copyright Acts of 1870 and 1909 apply. Under these Acts, at the moment each painting was first offered for sale to the general public it became, in copyright jargon, "published" and, since none of the paintings are known to have been registered or carry a copyright notice, at that moment they entered the public domain. The only exception to this general pattern would be for paintings that were in the artist's estate at his death in 1898, and remained in the hands of the artist's heirs without being offered for sale until 1978, when the Copyright Act of 1976 (Title 17, U.S. Code) introduced a new set of rules for previously unpublished works. No drawings or paintings are known to fit this exception. It is known that Tavernier was chronically short of money and made every effort to sell his sketches and paintings. So it is unlikely that any doucmented exceptions will turn up.

Photographs may be subject to copyright by the photographer or the person who hired the photographer. The 1978 Copyright regime would apply, thus requiring permission of the copyright owner for publication. However, to qualify for copyright protection, a photograph must have elements of originality. A photograph that is intended to reproduce a painting as accurately as technically possible can be argued to lack the originality necessary to qualify for copyright protection. Following this argument, the United States District Court in the February 1999 case Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v Corel Corp denied Bridgeman's claim of copyright in its photographs of public domain paintings.

In a similar vein all of the magazine/newspaper wood-cuts reproduced in this catalog were published before 1924 and therefore are currently in the public domain.

On this basis, the material that was scanned to produce the derived images in this catalog are assumed to be in the public domain. If anyone has evidence to the contrary please contact the museum.