This "mammoth plate" portrait may be the largest surviving daguerreotype from California, and is the largest known by R.H. Vance.
Horatio G. Finch, born in 1819 in Hamilton Co. Indiana, came to California in 1849 aboard the steamship Panama. After mining on the American River and at Big Bar, he later lived in Benicia and San Francisco. Following the Civil War, he became a farmer in Solano County.