Timothy O'Sullivan

albumen print, on the two-toned Wheeler Survey mount, the photographer's credit, title, 'No. 10,' and survey information in letterpress on the mount, matted, 1873

Lunn Gallery, Washington, D. C.

Acquired from the above by Tartt Gallery, Washington, D. C., early 1980s

Acquired by the Quillan Company from the above, 1989

Jill Quasha, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs (New York, 1991), pl. 39 (this print)

Other prints of this image:

Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall, T. H. O'Sullivan: Photographer (Rochester: The George Eastman House, 1966), pl. 37

James D. Horan, Timothy O'Sullivan: America's Forgotten Photographer (New York, 1966), p. 310

Joel Snyder, American Frontiers: Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1867-1874 (Aperture, 1981), p. 95

Rick Dingus, The Photographic Artifacts of Timothy O'Sullivan (Albuquerque, 1982), fig. 17

Weston J. Naef and James N. Wood, Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1975, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 62

Dover Publications, Wheeler's Photographic Survey of the American West, 1871-1873 (New York, 1983), frontispiece and pl. 41

Daniel Wolf, The American Space: Meaning in Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography (Middletown, 1983), pl. 58

Oliver Mathews, Early Photographs and Early Photographers: a Survey in Dictionary Form (London, 1973), pl. 138

Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs & Illustrations for U. S. Surveys, 1850 - 1890 (Berkeley, 2007), fig. 1, p. 2

Grading this albumen print on a scale of 1 to 10 - 10 being an albumen print that has deep brown dark tones and highlights that retain all of their original detail - this print rates 9. There is a faint 3-inch linear vertical scuff to the left of the center of the image, visible only when the print is examined closely in raking light. Some old retouching in the lower right corner is visible upon close examination. There is a small and inconsequential indentation near the center of the print. The original Wheeler Survey mount is age-darkened at the periphery, with several small rectilinear discolored areas, possibly due to past contact with tape. There is a strip of old linen tape running across the top edge of the mount which has age darkened considerably.
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The Canyon de Chelle, from the Navajo word meaning 'among the cliffs,' was photographed by Timothy O'Sullivan in 1873, during the expedition led by Lt. George M. Wheeler to the American Southwest.  Located in the northeast corner of Arizona, the Canyon de Chelle was still inhabited by Indians when the Survey party arrived, but the cliff-dwellings had long been abandoned.  O'Sullivan's photograph captures the 'White House Ruins,' as they are known, in the sweep of rock that rises to the rim of the canyon hundreds of feet beyond the picture's frame. 

O'Sullivan's Cañon de Chelle is among the very best of the nineteenth-century Survey photographs, and it has set a standard against which other photographs of the Canyon are judged.   When Ansel Adams made his own view of the cliff-dwellings in 1941, he wrote to Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, 'I photographed the White House Ruins from almost the identical spot and time of the O'Sullivan picture!!' (Ansel Adams: Letters 1916 -1984, p. 136).  Adams owned a print of the photograph offered here, which he loaned to Beaumont Newhall's pioneering 1937 exhibition of photography at The Museum of Modern Art.   When the great Alfred Stieglitz saw this O'Sullivan in the show, he pronounced, 'Nothing better has been done' (ibid., p. 126).