Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo

Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo explores the life and career of the 19^th-century French-American artist-adventurer, whose résumé ranges from showing at the Paris Salon to painting erupting volcanoes in Hawaii. The exhibition, opening in New York and traveling to San Francisco’s De Young Museum in December, centers on his 1878 canvas Dance in a Subterranean Roundhouse at Clear Lake, California, depicting a Pomo Indian ceremony. The piece was commissioned by San Francisco banker Tiburcio Parrott for his Parisian business associate Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Their party, which had its eye on the tribe’s mineral-rich ancestral lands, can be seen among the crowd of Indigenous onlookers.