Carleton E. Watkins

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter E. Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins: Photographs 1861–1874 (San Francisco, Fraenkel Gallery, 1989), no. 17 (this print)

Weston Naef and Christine Hult-Lewis, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), cat. no. 168

Tyler Green, Carleton Watkins: Making the West American (Oakland, 2018), p. 112

San Francisco, Fraenkel Gallery, Carleton Watkins: Photographs 1861 - 1874, May - August 1989

In the July 1863 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, cultural critic and amateur photographer Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of Watkins' photographs of Yosemite: 'As specimens of art they are admirable, and some of the subjects are among the  most interesting to be found in the whole realm of Nature. . . the mighty precipice of El Capitan, more than three thousand feet in precipitous height, - the three conical hill-tops of Yo Semite [The Three Brothers], taken not as they soar into the atmosphere, but as they are reflected into the calm waters below - these and others are shown clear, yet soft, vigorous in the foreground, delicately distinct in the distance, in a perfection of art which compares with the finest European work.' (quoted in Tyler Green, pp. 111-12).  

Prints of this image are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005.100.1275); the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (85.XM.361.23); George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester (1981.2899.0015); and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.