biography of Charles KOPPEL (XIX)

Addresses: Active in California 1853-65

Profession: Survey artist; portraitist

Work: Amon Carter Mus., Fort Worth, TX

Comments: Served as "assistant civil engineer and artist" of the California railroad survey party under Lt. R. S. Williamson, which sailed from NYC in May 1853 and arrived in San Francisco in June 1853. Williamson's report was illustrated with 21 lithographs and 26 wood-cuts after Koppel's sketches in the field, of which the best known is his view of Los Angeles made in November 1853. Nothing is known of Koppel's subsequent career, except that his portrait of Jefferson Davis was published as a lithographic print in 1865.

Sources: G&W; Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 266-67; Peters, America on Stone; Van Nostrand and Coulter, California Pictorial, 152-53. More recently, see P&H Samuels, Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West.