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POSTDILUVIAN PLUCK: The Stanfords
row to the governor's inauguration.
Courtesy Joan Hancock |
The top-hatted man and
the woman with the rose parasol are rowing through high
water past stately buildings, but don’t be fooled
into thinking this is Venice. It’s 1862 Sacramento,
and the new governor of California must ford floodwaters
to reach his inauguration. The wave-rippled moment is
just one scene from “The Adventures of Leland
and Jane,” a folk-art exhibit mounted in April
by Palo Alto painter Joan Hancock.
Examining the lives of the Stanfords as “our
folktale,” Hancock gives Leland and Jane their
fanciful due in 51 multimedia paintings and three-dimensional
pieces. The series took about a year to create and was
displayed for a month in the Anita Seipp Gallery at
Castilleja School in Palo Alto.
From Leland’s birth at the Bull’s Head
Inn in Albany, N.Y., through Jane’s mysterious
death in Hawaii, Hancock depicts wryly chosen anecdotes
about the University’s founding couple. The first
work she painted for the series was a portrait of the
Big Four, California’s 19th-century railroad magnates.
The stout, bearded, vested and watch-chained Robber
Barons stand shoulder-to-shoulder before the Sierra
(and look identical except for the monograms on their
pocket handkerchiefs). Thereafter, Hancock skipped around
in the Stanfords’ chronology, adding a wedding
portrait in which Jane’s layered dress echoes
the event’s monumental cake, landscapes from the
Farm, some faux collections of insects and antiquities
attributed to Leland Jr., and mock artifacts from the
family’s travels and mansions.
Connected to the University as the wife of emeritus
professor of medicine E. William Hancock, the painter
brings a terrific sense of humor to her work. She points
to a small painting of a croquet shot seen from the
knees down. Stanford aficionados, she says, will know
it quotes the painting Palo Alto Spring, in
which Leland Jr. wore those striped socks. A rendition
of the horse ring where Leland’s pampered colts
went to “horse kindergarten” incorporates
a Tinkertoy-and-chopstick mechanism that viewers can
move to make one little horse dance on the track. In
a painting of three fat cats in Stanford’s private
train car, two of the men’s arms can be moved
so that they raise cigars to their lips. Leland and
Jane skinny-dip in a hot spring on land he purchased
near Fremont, looking like Adam and Eve if Adam had
curlicued chest hair and Eve wore statement jewelry.
Hancock works mainly in acrylic on gessoed boards or
brass sheeting, but the paintings are enhanced with
rubber stamping, press-on lettering, linoleum tacks,
stencils, gold wire, photocopies and puffy fabric paint.
Hancock is quick to demur that she “glossed over
all the financial finagling” of Leland’s
biography. But one piece, Railroad Pagoda,
a tall, elegant shape of rippling brass sheeting that
echoes railroad ties and Asian architecture, pays tribute
to the Chinese immigrant labor that built the Central
Pacific Railroad. Another resembles an antique game
board in which railroad tracks meet at the center. Small
images of tarot and playing cards and mah-jongg pieces
embellish the painting, and its caption in the exhibit
read: “From the Atlantic side came the poker players,
living on pork and beans and whisky. From the Pacific
side came mah-jongg players, living on rice and kelp
and boiled tea. The Wheel of Fortune dealt many lots
before the two railroad lines were joined.”
Hancock, 70, bears the Stanfords’ plutocrat status
in mind and admits, “I don’t know if we
would really like them as people.” But she has
tremendous empathy for their remarkable life circumstances.
She gives the background for Leland’s venturing
west to join his merchant brothers after a fire destroyed
his law practice in Wisconsin (“It wasn’t
a success,” she confides, “because everyone
only spoke German”), rejoices over Jane’s
near-miraculous pregnancy after 18 years of marriage,
and mourns the typhoid death of their son (portrayed
in a painting that keeps a respectful distance by showing
the exterior of the Hotel Bristol in Florence, and the
Stanfords in silhouette.)
And she has no doubts about their excellence as folk
legend. One of her paintings shows a be-flourished gilt
bird, which she says represents the mechanical birds
with real feathers that decorated the Stanfords’
dining room in Sacramento. At their San Francisco mansion,
the couple wanted more aviary authenticity and would
have real birds released into the drawing room after
meals. “Can you imagine?” Hancock exclaims.
Seeing “The Adventures of Leland and Jane,”
you can. |
