Mary Curtis Richardson

Mary Curtis Richardson was an impressionist painter and known as the "Mary Cassatt of the West". Her father, Lucien Curtis travelled by ship via Panama to the gold fields of California in 1849. The following year, Mary, her brother Joseph, her sister Leila, her mother Coelia and widowed grandmother Mary Day Perkins also went to California via the Isthmus of Panama to join her father in Sacramento, where he was the first town clerk. They soon moved on to Vallejo, then Petaluma, Oakland and finally San Francisco.