Photo: “The Founding of Los Angeles” by Millard Sheets

Photographer: From the J.J. Prats magazine collection. A crop of the supplement in Touring Topics
Taken: September 1931
Caption: “The Founding of Los Angeles” by Millard Sheets
Additional Description: This digital image is a photograph of a chromolithograph created by an uncredited lithograph artist employed by Touring Topics magazine. The artist copied Millard Sheets’ 32½ x 16 inch oil painting manually by sight, color-by-color, onto lithograph plates that were then used to print the image you see here for the supplement included with the magazine’s September 1931 issue. The painting was likely commissioned by the magazine, retained by Mr. Sheets, and last sold at private auction in 1990, the year after he died.

The supplement is a sheet of paper 16¼ x 11¾ inches, printed on one side only and folded in half to tuck into the magazine after it was bound. The painting took up 14½ x 7½ inches of it and below it was printed a 14-stanza poem, a ballad by John Russell McCarthy, and the legend “Supplement to Touring Topics, September, 1931. Phil Townsend Hanna, Editor.”

The supplement illustrates an article in this issue, written by Mr. Hanna, titled “Our Lady in the Beginning: The story of the foundation and the original settlers—all that is known of a certainty—of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, la Reina de los Angeles.” The article is illustrated with line drawings by Maynard Dixon and includes a pictorial map by Dillon Lauritzen.

A black-and-white digital image of this same chromolithograph is circulating on the internet credited as a copy of a mural. There are a number murals depicting the Founding of Los Angeles at various venues in the city, but this is not one of them.
Submitted: December 2, 2023, by J. J. Prats of Powell, Ohio.
Database Locator Identification Number: p763174
File Size: 6.013 Megabytes

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