Yosemite Man

In the National Park Service headquarters on the University of California campus at Berkeley, men were hard at work last week framing, glazing and cataloging a collection of 198 oil and watercolor paintings. At the same time, high in the snows of Yosemite, Director C. A. ("Bert") Harwell of the Yosemite National Park Museum was scratching his head over the largest windfall his institution had ever received.

A collection of sheep horns, plaster relief maps, Indian blankets, rock specimens, framed photographs, stuffed animals, miners' picks and other objects assembled during the past 20 years, the Yosemite National Park Museum owes its present attractive two-story stone building to a $75,000 grant in 1924 from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation. Besides the necessary offices for park naturalists, guides and officials, sheep horns and blankets have filled most of the rest of the available space, yet by order of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, the museum must now find room for these 198 paintings, most of the life work of the man who for many years was Yosemite Valley's second most famed inhabitant: the late Christian ("Chris") Jorgensen.

Artist Jorgensen reached California from his native Oslo in 1870, aged 10. He was the first enrolled pupil of the California School of Fine Arts. In 1883, when he had served as the school's assistant director for two years, he married a pupil, Angela Ghirardelli, daughter of famed Chocolate Manufacturer Domingo Ghirardelli, producer of what is still California's best-selling cocoa, and never had to work for a living again. After studying painting in Italy for two years, the Jorgensens moved to Yosemite Valley, built and furnished a home and studio entirely with their own hands, lived there for eleven years while bearded Chris Jorgensen, a capable, conservative, never exciting painter, covered acres of canvas with views of Yosemite Falls, the Half Dome, El Capitan and the rest of the valley's wonders. The Jorgensens became fast friends of the valley's best-known inhabitant, bearded Naturalist John Muir. In 1903 when Theodore Roosevelt visited the valley he outraged the inhabitants by turning down an elaborate reception to eat flap jacks over a campfire with Naturalist Muir and Painter Jorgensen.

In 1905 Artist Jorgensen moved away from Yosemite to build another home, entirely of boulders, at Carmel-by-the-Sea, within pistol shot of the homes of Poet Robinson Jeffers and the late Lincoln Steffens, but he continued to visit Yosemite from time to time, continued to paint it. In June 1935, Chris Jorgensen died.

Being financially independent, Chris Jorgensen sold few of his pictures. When his widow died last February, she willed nearly 200 of them to the Department of the Interior, which in turn presented them to Yosemite Park's little museum.

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