Old California Houses: Portraits and Stories

Old California Houses: Portraits and Stories by Marion Randall Parsons is both an art book and a work of historical imagination. Originating in a painter’s sketching tour, the volume preserves vignettes of California’s architectural and cultural past—old adobes, mission-era ranch houses, miners’ boarding places, schools, churches, and grand mansions—through portraits paired with richly anecdotal narratives. Parsons deliberately moves beyond monuments marked for preservation, drawing instead...