Ansel Adams 1902-1984

Gift of the photographer to a private collector, Oakland, California, late 1930s

Sotheby's New York, 17 April 2002, Sale 7777, Lot 24

Acquired by Margaret W. Weston from the above

Another print of this image:

John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at 100 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2001, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 47

The photograph offered here was given originally by Adams to a close friend of the Curry family, whose Yosemite Park and Curry Company was the primary concessionaire in Yosemite National Park for 70 years.  It was among a group of 32 early Ansel Adams photographs offered in these rooms on 17 April 2002 (Sale 7777, Lots 14-39).  This unusual group, a trove of significant early Adams images in superb condition, established a new benchmark for early prints by Ansel Adams at auction.  Lot 56 in this catalogue also comes from this group.

It is believed that most of the photographs in the group were printed in the late 1930s. Winter - Yosemite is printed on lustrous double-weight paper and mounted on white Bristol board, which has a slick white clay or baryta coating on its front and a matte surface on the reverse.  The label is one designed by Lawton Kennedy for Adams's 1936 exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's American Place gallery in New York.

From her earliest days as a gallery director, Maggi Weston was drawn not only to Ansel Adams's well-known images, but also to his earliest--and lesser-known--work.  Usually small in format, perhaps in ways more subtle, and above all scarce, these early prints convey a different side of the photographer, one that Maggi Weston recognized and loved.  As she wrote in the catalogue for an exhibition of her personal collection of Adamses, From the Private Collection of Margaret W. Weston: Ansel Adams, at the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, in 1995:

'I began personally collecting Ansel's photographs in 1976.  I have always been drawn to his earlier and lesser known work.  I shared Ansel's appreciation for his earliest work and as such my collection has emphasis in this direction.  Ansel Adams is best known for his dramatic pictorialist images of the sublime in nature.  While I love his more popular signature pieces I have endeavored to show the great breadth of his artistic vision in this exhibition.'

For other early Adams photographs offered in the present catalogue, see Lots 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, and 57.