b. 1827, Saint-Malo, France; d. 1898, San Francisco, California Ernest-Etienne Narjot de Franceville was one of San Francisco’s foremost artists during the 1870s and 1880s. The son of painter Philippe Pierre Narjot de Franceville, Ernest Narjot studied art in Paris before joining the Gold Rush to California in 1849, sailing around Cape Horn to San Francisco. He both painted and prospected and i…

b. 1827, Saint-Malo, France; d. 1898, San Francisco, California Ernest-Etienne Narjot de Franceville was one of San Francisco’s foremost artists during the 1870s and 1880s. The son of painter Philippe Pierre Narjot de Franceville, Ernest Narjot studied art in Paris before joining the Gold Rush to California in 1849, sailing around Cape Horn to San Francisco. He both painted and prospected and in 1852 joined a mining expedition to Sonora, Mexico, where he settled and married a member of the Santos Ortiz family in 1860. In 1865 he returned with his wife to San Francisco, where he devoted himself to painting, achieving success with his portraits, landscape and genre paintings, and decorations for churches and public buildings. He was a member of the San Francisco Art Association and the Bohemian Club and was a frequent contributor to the annual Industrial Exhibitions of the Mechanics Institute, often winning cash awards. While working on frescoes in the tomb of Leland Stanford (destroyed 1906), paint dropped in one eye, resulting in partial blindness. The accident greatly depressed him, and although he continued to paint he created no significant work thereafter. In his later years he suffered from paralysis and delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately many of his paintings were destroyed in the fire that followed the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.