Mission San Gabriel Arcángel altar

The Early California Lantern Slides consist of 89 glass lantern slides of California missions and landscapes.

The collection is mostly a study of both interior and exterior views of most of the California missions, from Mission San Diego de Alcalá in the southwest corner of Calfornia to Mission San Francisco Solano in the north.

As a collection, the slides are an interesting study of mission architecture: we can observe the various styles of the missions, such as neoclassical and Baroque. They also provide a larger context for the missions as they appeared in the early twentieth century: distressed and ruined by neglect, earthquakes, weather, and human hands. They provide a before-and-after comparison to study the preservation movement and efforts to reconstruct the missions in the first half of the twentieth century.