Hellman, Isaias W. Portrait, ca. 1899

As the president or director of seventeen banks at various points in his career, and as one of California’s largest landowners, first-generation German immigrant Isaias W. Hellman played a central role in the development of America’s Pacific Coast. This photographic reproduction of German-Jewish artist Toby Rosenthal’s 1899 portrait painting of Hellman was published in George Ward Burton’s Men of Achievement in the Great Southwest (1904).

Source: George Ward Burton,Men of Achievement in the Great Southwest. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times, 1904, p. 52.