We are grateful to Professor Luis-Martín Lozano for his assistance cataloguing this work.

The mural painter Parker Hall (1898-1982) and his wife, the painter Maxine Albro (1903-1966), met Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in San Francisco in 1931, as Hall recounts in a 1964 oral history interview conducted by Mary McChesney for the Archives of American Art. Hall recalls that Rivera gave him the present work as a gift since Hall had designed a pair of earrings for Frida. When Rivera and Kahlo arrived in San Francisco in 1930 they had a significant impact on California’s artistic community—hence, the numerous friends and collaborators who worked as assistants on the San Francisco Art Institute murals and the Stock Exchange Building (now, The San Francisco City Club). Rivera made numerous trips around the San Francisco Bay area in order to capture the landscape he would include in his project to paint various murals at the San Francisco Art Institute, which at the end was reduced to one wall, in The Making of a Fresco. This watercolor was executed during one of those scenic drives along the Bay area which explains its date and the dedication to Parker Hall in 1931. And while small, it demonstrates the typical characteristics of Rivera’s studies—a looseness achieved through fast confident brushstrokes that enabled him to capture even from a moving car, the cliffs around San Francisco, the very terrain of the mountain, and the various posts throughout the winding road around the Bay.

Professor Luis-Martín Lozano, Mexico City