Accessed at URL:
Originally accessed:
01/03/2007
Organization:
Historic Fresno
Notes:
"That same year Heinsbergen undertook designing the interior decor for the new Hotel Tioga in Merced, California. For dramatic effect, he drew upon such diverse sources as Native-American, Spanish and Italian design traditions. Borrowing from the indigenous designs of hand-woven baskets, he created boldly-patterned geometric borders richly painted in authentic hues of red, blue, black, yellow and white. Portraits of King Ferdinand V, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa and Hernando de Soto he rendered in the heroic Spanish tradition. His Italian-inspired beams, panels and mouldings were lavishly trimmed in gold leaf, then hand-detailed using Tiffany-derived coloration in elephant-hide grey, purple and green. Other surfaces were adorned with Italian ribbon motifs polychromed in red, blue, gray, green and gold. Heinsbergen's keen sense of color and vivid palette, along with his innate ability to combine distinctively different architectural vocabularies into a visually cohesive mixed idiom, were handsomely illustrated in the Hotel Tioga. During this period of tremendous artistic output, Heinsbergen's firm often employed a work force of more than one hundred artists and artisans."
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