The top-hatted man and the woman with the rose parasol are rowing through high water past stately buildings, but don’t be fooled into thinking this is Venice. It’s 1862 Sacramento, and the new governor of California must ford floodwaters to reach his inauguration. The wave-rippled moment is just one scene from “The Adventures of Leland and Jane,” a folk-art exhibit mounted in April by Palo Alto painter Joan Hancock.
Examining the lives of the Stanfords as “our folktale,” Hancock gives Leland and Jane their fanciful due in 51 multimedia paintings and three-dimensional pieces. The series took about a year to create and was displayed for a month in the Anita Seipp Gallery at Castilleja School in Palo Alto.
From Leland’s birth at the Bull’s Head Inn in Albany, N.Y., through Jane’s mysterious death in Hawaii, Hancock depicts wryly chosen anecdotes about the University’s founding couple. The first work she painted for the series was a portrait of the Big Four, California’s 19th-century railroad magnates. The stout, bearded, vested and watch-chained Robber Barons stand shoulder-to-shoulder before the Sierra (and look identical except for the monograms on their pocket handkerchiefs). Thereafter, Hancock skipped around in the Stanfords’ chronology, adding a wedding portrait in which Jane’s layered dress echoes the event’s monumental cake, landscapes from the Farm, some faux collections of insects and antiquities attributed to Leland Jr., and mock artifacts from the family’s travels and mansions.
Connected to the University as the wife of emeritus professor of medicine E. William Hancock, the painter brings a terrific sense of humor to her work. She points to a small painting of a croquet shot seen from the knees down. Stanford aficionados, she says, will know it quotes the painting Palo Alto Spring, in which Leland Jr. wore those striped socks. A rendition of the horse ring where Leland’s pampered colts went to “horse kindergarten” incorporates a Tinkertoy-and-chopstick mechanism that viewers can move to make one little horse dance on the track. In a painting of three fat cats in Stanford’s private train car, two of the men’s arms can be moved so that they raise cigars to their lips. Leland and Jane skinny-dip in a hot spring on land he purchased near Fremont, looking like Adam and Eve if Adam had curlicued chest hair and Eve wore statement jewelry. Hancock works mainly in acrylic on gessoed boards or brass sheeting, but the paintings are enhanced with rubber stamping, press-on lettering, linoleum tacks, stencils, gold wire, photocopies and puffy fabric paint.
Hancock is quick to demur that she “glossed over all the financial finagling” of Leland’s biography. But one piece, Railroad Pagoda, a tall, elegant shape of rippling brass sheeting that echoes railroad ties and Asian architecture, pays tribute to the Chinese immigrant labor that built the Central Pacific Railroad. Another resembles an antique game board in which railroad tracks meet at the center. Small images of tarot and playing cards and mah-jongg pieces embellish the painting, and its caption in the exhibit read: “From the Atlantic side came the poker players, living on pork and beans and whisky. From the Pacific side came mah-jongg players, living on rice and kelp and boiled tea. The Wheel of Fortune dealt many lots before the two railroad lines were joined.”
Hancock, 70, bears the Stanfords’ plutocrat status in mind and admits, “I don’t know if we would really like them as people.” But she has tremendous empathy for their remarkable life circumstances. She gives the background for Leland’s venturing west to join his merchant brothers after a fire destroyed his law practice in Wisconsin (“It wasn’t a success,” she confides, “because everyone only spoke German”), rejoices over Jane’s near-miraculous pregnancy after 18 years of marriage, and mourns the typhoid death of their son (portrayed in a painting that keeps a respectful distance by showing the exterior of the Hotel Bristol in Florence, and the Stanfords in silhouette.)
And she has no doubts about their excellence as folk legend. One of her paintings shows a be-flourished gilt bird, which she says represents the mechanical birds with real feathers that decorated the Stanfords’ dining room in Sacramento. At their San Francisco mansion, the couple wanted more aviary authenticity and would have real birds released into the drawing room after meals. “Can you imagine?” Hancock exclaims.
Seeing “The Adventures of Leland and Jane,” you can.
