Note
Christian Siemer
(b. 1874, New Zealand – d. 1940, Los Angeles)
MOUNT WILSON OBSERVATORY
c.1932, Oil on canvas, 47 x 71 inches
Jonathan Club collection
Born in Adelaide, Australia, Christian Siemer studied art in Paris and Munich and eventually settled in Los Angeles after 1913. In 1925 he received a one-year contract from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to paint forty-seven panoramas of Southern California to decorate the ground floor display space of the Chamber's new quarters on Twelfth Street. He continued to paint for the Chamber until his death in 1940.
The observatory atop Mount Wilson, located in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Pasadena, houses the 10-inch Hale Telescope, which between 1917 and 1948 boasted to be the world's largest telescope. Many important discoveries were made there, particularly after 1919, when the use of the first optical interferometer allowed the size of distant stars to be measured. The observatory is still in use today.