This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| A sketch artist and photographer, Isaiah West Taber was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and went to the Mother Lode area of California in the Gold Rush of 1850. However, he abandoned mining for ranching and then lived in San Francisco where he was a dentist.
He did pen and ink drawings including "Vigilance Committee Hanging James Stuart, San Francisco" (1851) and Sacramento River" (1850), which hang in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1854, he returned to New Bedford and studied photography and opened a studio in Syracuse, New York. Ten years later, he went back to California where he joined the San Francisco photography firm of Bradley and Rulofson. By 1871, he was in business for himself and became one of San Francisco's most popular portrait photographers.
He was also named a Commissioner to Yosemite Valley in 1888. In the 1906 San Francisco fire, he lost 20 tons of landscape negatives and 30 tons of portrait negatives. Later he acquired a large cache of Carleton Watkins negatives, from which he made illustrations for Century Magazine.
Taber died in San Francisco in 1912.
Source:
Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940 |
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