The forty-seven examples of historical California art featured in California Grandeur and Genre are no longer extant. They were destroyed in the fire that swept through the Oakland Hills on Sunday, October 20, 1991. James L Coran and Walter A. Nelson-Rees, avid collectors of California paintings dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lost their entire collection of over seven hundred works.

California Grandeur and Genre had been scheduled as an exhibition to highlight selections from their collection.

Originally planned as the exhibition catalog, this book concentrates on two recurring themes in California painting: landscape and lifestyle. While some artists captured the grandeur of California's countryside, others focused on genre scenes, images of everyday life. The selected works trace the development of California art over a period of seventy-five years. The earliest paintings are by William Hahn, Herman Herzog and Thomas Hill, artists who rose to prominence in the 1870s.

Their landscapes focus on the drama of the land, contrasting deep valleys with towering mountains. Late nineteenth-century harbor scenes by Albert Bierstadt and William Coulter record the importance of the Pacific Ocean in the growth of the state. At the turn of the century the California Decorative Style developed, as seen in lyrical compositions by Arthur Matthews and Francis McComas. Influenced by Impressionism, plein air painting became the dominant style in the first decades of the twentieth century, and is represented in canvases by Maurice Braun, Granville Redmond, William Wendt and others.

Beginning in the 1920s members of the Society of Six, among them Selden Gile, Maurice Logan,and Louis Siegriest, painted landscapes in a bold, Modernist style using bright, expressive color. The forty-three artists included in California Grandeur and Genre are some of the most respected names in historical California art. This book provides a lasting record of these lost paintings.