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Description
A lost sketch was the basis for this lithographic view by Grafton Tyler Brown, a Pennsylvania-born Black illustrator. Brown depicted the vast landscape as part of a larger artistic commission: the illustration of San Mateo County’s landmarks in a period when Mexican families such as Victoriano Guerrero’s were losing their ethnic dominance in the region to non-Hispanic settlers. Using a lithographic crayon, Brown renders the texture of crops and livestock at the active rancho (ranch). He emphasizes Guerrero’s tactics of enclosing the earth, which differed from its communal use by the area’s natives, the Ramaytush Ohlone people.