Signed C.Leavy and inscribed “To ‘Butch’, Jan. ‘98”. 9 x 15” visible image, matted, in 13.5 x 21.5” period frame.

Art directories that describe Leavy as a wholesale grocery executive who studied at the San Francisco School of Design in the 1890s, missed his one claim to artistic fame - among collectors of Western barroom art, who pay heftily for original 1907-10 prints of his paintings, 4.5 x 3 foot advertisements for Cyrus Noble Whiskey, which were prominently displayed in many 1900-era California saloons: “The Double ‘O’” showed a group of men in bowler hats betting at a roulette table, while “Bucking The Tiger” featured cowboys and “gents” grouped around a Faro card table.

When, a decade earlier, Leavy drew this Chinatown scene, he had not yet begun his advertising career as Ad Manager for the best-selling West coast whiskey. Though coming from a prominent San Francisco Jewish family - his brother was City Controller of San Francisco and his sister a feminist leader of New Zealand - Clarence Leavy died in obscurity in 1934. Apart from his whiskey ad prints, this Chinatown drawing may be the only survival of his youthful aspirations.