By Karen Davis
Guest Columnist

A resident of today’s fast-growing San Antonio may have a hard time picturing what the city looked like in its early years of adobe buildings and dirt streets. But a new exhibit at the Witte Museum, “For History’s Sake,” takes the viewer back to those days through a series of paintings, sketches and historical artifacts.

One of the paintings, “Chili Queens at the Alamo,” created by Julian Onderdonk in 1910, has been on loan to the White House during the Bush administration and was returned to the Witte for this exhibit.

The display, which runs through Nov. 30 in the museum’s Piper Memorial Wing, features about 50 works of art and a number of artifacts to give the viewer an idea of what it was like to live here in days past. The scope of the exhibit ranges from the mid-1800s to the middle of the 20th century.

“The focus is on Main Plaza and life in downtown San Antonio, the missions, the military in San Antonio and South Texas, and the Mexican War,” said Kate Sheerin, who is curating the exhibit with Bruce Shackelford, the Brown Foundation curator at the Witte. “There are landscapes from the country and also (depictions of) urban life. We want the exhibit to show how Texas developed by using the museum’s collection of paintings, sketches and archival memorabilia.”

On display are four paintings by William G.M. Samuel, each depicting one side of Main Plaza in the mid-1800s. And there is a series of paintings of the five Spanish missions from the same period by artist Theodore Gentilz.

There’s an early portrait sketch of Sam Houston by Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, the father of Julian. The elder Onderdonk also did a painting of the fall of the Alamo. Artist Carl Nebel created lithographs of Mexican War battles.

Among the landscapes are bluebonnet paintings, street scenes from early San Antonio and farms in Fredericksburg in the 1860s.

“Both of the Onderdonks, Gentilz and other artists made wonderful studies of flowers and plants and birds,” Sheerin said. “Mary Wills painted flowers and plants in the San Antonio area. You don’t see exhibits of works on paper that frequently, so it is good to see them together in this collection.”

Many of the items in the exhibit are included in the book “Art for History’s Sake: The Texas Collection of the Witte Museum,” written by longtime Witte curator Cecilia Steinfeldt and released in 1993. But the current exhibit goes further than the book did, Sheerin said.

“She (Steinfeldt) was limited to fine art in the book, while this exhibit includes both art and artifacts,” she said. Those artifacts include decorative arts, furniture, silver and supporting written material.

“We have horned furniture, Mexican War medals, an oxcart wheel from the early 1800s, wildlife and flower specimens, a sombrero from the 1890s and items from the museum’s textile collection,” Sheerin said. “This exhibit is a real document of civilized and natural life in Texas.”

Entrance to the exhibit is free with museum admission. For more information, including views of some of the artworks, visit the museum Web site at www.wittemuseum.org. For more information, call (210) 357-1900.

Karen Davis, a veteran San Antonio journalist, writes an occasional arts column for this paper. To send her comments or suggestions for coverage, e-mail her at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it