Carleton E. Watkins 1829-1916

mammoth-plate albumen print, mounted, the photographer’s letterpress label, with the title, series number 807, series title, and his ‘427 Montgomery Street, San Francisco’ studio address, affixed to the mount, the collector’s stamp on the reverse, matted, framed, the Monterey Museum of Art exhibition label on the reverse, 1878-81

The Old Book Store, San Francisco, 1967

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

The Three Brothers was photographed by Watkins on each of his trips into Yosemite, from essentially the same vantage point.  As with the ‘New Series’ views in general, the present photograph is more broadly horizontal, capturing not only the peaks themselves, but more of the landscape on either side. 

Browning discusses several possible origins of the name.  Most interesting is his account of an Indian name meaning either ‘mountains playing leap-frog,’ or, possibly, something sexually suggestive.  As he points out, Three Brothers appears on the 1865 King and Gardner map of the Valley (op. cit., p. 144).  Watkins used an Indian name, Pompompasos, in the title for the photograph presented in Lot 71, a mirror view.

Earlier views of the Three Brothers, from 1861 and circa 1865-66, are reproduced in Fraenkel, op. cit., pls. 17 and 18; and in Naef and Wood, op. cit., pl. 5, there dated ‘about 1861.’