Mission San Miguel Arcángel
— the paint that stayed two hundred years.
Not only on a wall.
“A small adobe church on the old Camino Real, north of Paso Robles, in a town that is mostly the mission and the road. The interior is what people come for. Frescoes painted in 1821 by Esteban Munras and a circle of Salinan craftsmen, the only mission interior in California that was never repainted over its first colour. The friars still live next door. The cemetery holds the men and women who built the place. Outside, the Salinas Valley does what the Salinas Valley does in summer: bleached gold and quiet, with the long arcade of arches throwing shade against the heat.
Mission San Miguel Arcángel, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Mission San Miguel Arcángel was founded on July 25, 1797 by Padre Fermín Lasuén, the sixteenth of the twenty-one Alta California missions established along El Camino Real. It sits in the small town of San Miguel in northern San Luis Obispo County, about eight miles north of Paso Robles and roughly two hundred miles up the coast from Los Angeles. The mission church faces east across the Salinas River and was built to serve the Salinan people, who had lived in the surrounding hills for thousands of years before the Franciscans arrived. The current church, completed in 1818, replaced an earlier adobe lost to fire.
The interior murals are the reason San Miguel is famous among the California missions. Painted in 1821 by the Spanish layman artist Esteban Munras and a circle of Salinan apprentices, the frescoes line the nave with a trompe-l'oeil colonnade, an All-Seeing Eye above the altar, and bands of marbled colour that imitate the European cathedrals Munras had seen. They are the only mission interior in California that has never been repainted. The pigments are earth reds, ochres, soot blacks, and copper greens, mixed on site from local minerals. The work was nearly lost to a 2003 earthquake; a long retrofit reopened the church to the public in 2009.
San Miguel remains an active Franciscan friary and a working parish. The friars live in the convento next to the church, as they have since 1797 with a long interruption after secularization in 1834. The mission is open daily to visitors. A self-guided tour passes through the church, the cemetery (where roughly two thousand Salinan and Spanish-Californian neophytes are buried), the convento corridor, and the museum rooms that explain the long arc from founding to restoration. The cemetery holds the Reed family, killed at the mission in 1848 in one of California's first headline murder cases. There is no admission fee; a donation is asked. The grounds close at sunset.