Carleton E. Watkins

mammoth-plate albumen print, mounted, matted, framed, 1865-66

Private Collection

Acquired by Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, from the above, 1988

Acquired by the Quillan Company from the above, 1989

Jill Quasha, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs (New York, 1991), pl. 26 (this print)

This bold and dramatic print has strong brown/black dark tones and creamy highlights. Grading it on a scale of 1 to 10, this print surpasses a rating of 10. The deep, dark tones in the rock face on the right side of the image are especially impressive. When the print is examined closely in raking light, some very minor scuffs can be seen on the surface in the sky area. These are insignificant. This unsigned photograph has been credited to Watkins based upon the closely-related stereo view, No. 1153 from his Pacific Coast series, 'Tasayac, or the Half Dome, from Glacier Point.' A copy of this stereo view is available upon request from Sotheby's Photographs department. The main point of difference between the stereo view and the mammoth-plate albumen print offered here is that the stereo view lacks the clouds present in the mammoth-plate print. The clouds in the mammoth-plate photograph are printed from a second negative. The cloud negative utilized for the Quillan print also appears in at least one other mammoth-plate photograph: an unsigned print entitled 'Yosemite Valley from the Foot of the Mariposa Trail,' on a Thomas Houseworth & Co. mount, offered in these rooms on 9 October 1991 (Sale 6216, Lot 33). At that time of the 1991 sale, the Yosemite Valley image was attributed to Eadweard Muybridge. The J. Paul Getty Museum owns several unsigned Yosemite views on Houseworth mounts that have skies printed from this same cloud negative. In their course of research for the Carleton Watkins Mammoth Plate Catalogue Raisonne Project, the Getty has also located in other institutions additional unsigned prints, on Houseworth mounts, utilizing this cloud negative. All are on Houseworth mounts, but with no photographer credited. The Carleton Watkins Catalogue Raisonne Project is in the process of researching these unsigned Houseworth prints with the goal of crediting them to Carleton Watkins.
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This dramatic view of the Yosemite Valley was made at Glacier Point, whose dark promontory looms in sharp relief against the receding landscape below.   The magnificent Half Dome rises in the middle distance, with Tenaya Canyon and Mount Lyell beyond.  Although not signed, the present photograph is credited to Watkins based on a closely-related stereo view, No. 1153 of his Pacific Coast series, 'Tasayac, or the Half Dome, from Glacier Point.'   

No nineteenth-century photographer is more closely associated with Yosemite Valley than Carleton Watkins.  He photographed there over a span of decades, from the 1860s through the 1880s.  His best views were made with collodion glass-plate negatives and a mammoth-plate camera, and he never completely abandoned this format, even after newer, smaller, and quicker cameras had taken its place.  In 1864, Watkins's early mammoth-plates of Yosemite were instrumental in persuading the United States Congress to preserve the Valley, unspoiled, for future generations.   

In his Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception (San Francisco, 1999), Douglas Nickel writes that Watkins was concerned, above all, with giving his audience 'a visceral experience of western scale and space' (p. 28).   In its stark contrast of foreground and background, its vast perspective sweep from rock to horizon, the view offered here is as breathtaking today as it was when it was made.