Carleton E. Watkins 1829-1916

Focus Gallery, San Francisco, Early Views of Yosemite and the California Missions: Photographs by Carleton E. Watkins from the Collection of Gordon Bennett, November – December 1973

Monterey Museum of Art, Carleton E. Watkins: Yosemite Photographs, Courtesy of Gordon L. Bennett, June – September 1993

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception, May – September 1999, and thereafter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 1999 – January 2000; and the National Gallery of Art, February – April 2000

Nickel, Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception, pl. 33 (this print)

Another print of this image:

Naef, In Focus: Carleton Watkins (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997), pl. 21

In an 1851 narrative, written by a member of Mariposa Battalion’s Company B, the water pictured here is referred to as a “‘looking-glass pond’” (quoted in Browning, op. cit., p. 95).  Other names discussed by Browning include the Indian name, Lake Ah-wi-yah; Ke-ko-too-yem, or sleeping water; and Lake Hiawatha (ibid., pp. 95-6).  Joseph LeConte may have been aware of the former Indian name when he wrote, in a description of   beautiful morning in Yosemite, ‘Yonder, up the Tenaya Canon, nestling close under the shadow of Half Dome, lies Mirror Lake, fast asleep, her polished, black surface, not yet ruffled by the rising wind’ (op. cit., p. 30). 

Rising behind the lake is a mountain some 8,500 feet high, originally known by the Indian name Waijau, for Pine Mountain, but renamed in the 1860s for Carleton Watkins.  Paul Hickman (op. cit., p. 82, cf. Lot 49) has pointed out that the first reference to ‘Mt. Watkins’ appears on the 1865 map prepared by Clarence King and James T. Gardner soon after their 1864 season in the Sierra.  Hickman argues that it was probably William Henry Brewer, the Geological Survey field leader in 1863, who first suggested the name.  As Hickman relates, by 1863 Brewer was already acquainted with Watkins and his work, and talked at length to King of the “‘value of large photographs in geological surveys.’”  King himself referred to Watkins in a letter of December 1863 to Brewer as “‘the immortal one’” (both quoted in Hickman, ibid., p. 82). 

In 1861, Watkins made a photograph of the lake, and titled the picture with one of its Indian names, Lake Ah-Wi-Yah.  The ‘Old Series’ photograph, however, concentrates more on the mountain and the surrounding trees, giving no hint of the perfectly ordered and symmetrically reflective view that Watkins would later compose for the ‘New Series.’  As the late Peter Palmquist has pointed out, in his discussion of Watkins’s ‘New Series’ views, the Yosemite photographs from the 1878-81 trips place a new emphasis on ‘shimmering water areas’ (op. cit., p. 58).  Other photographs in the ‘New Series’ which demonstrate in particular a fresh perspective on Yosemite’s lakes, rivers, and waterfalls are found in Lots 51, 65, 67, 71, 73, 75, and 76. 

Mount Watkins and Mirror Lake—in reality, a pond which shrinks and expands with the seasons of the year—has looked much the same over the intervening decades.  The classic vantage point for picture-making, used by Watkins in this ‘New Series’ view, has not changed.  Ansel Adams made his own photograph of Mirror Lake and Mount Watkins in the 1930s, and but for cropping, the two views would appear quite similar.

For the 1861 Watkins view of Mirror Lake, see Naef and Wood, op. cit., pl. 1.  For the Ansel Adams photograph of Mirror Lake, see Sotheby’s New York photographs catalogue, 17 April 2002, Sale 7777, Lot 27.