Carleton E. Watkins

Daniel Wolf, Inc., New York, 1985

Naef 258

Daniel Wolf, ed., The American Space: Meaning in Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography (Middletown, 1983), pl. 26 (this print)

Brooks Johnson, ed., Nineteenth Century Mammoth Plates of the American West (Norfolk: The Chrysler Museum, 1979), p. 7

Rainer Fabian and Hans-Christian Adam, Masters of Early Travel Photography (New York and Paris, 1983), p. 270

Peter E. Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins: Photographer of the American West (Albuquerque, 1983), pl. 66

Douglas R. Nickel, Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1999), pl. 41

Amy Scott, ed., Yosemite: Art of an American Icon (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2006), p. 66

Weston Naef, Carleton Watkins in Yosemite (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), pl. 45

Prints of this dramatic mammoth-plate view are rare.  Only two other examples have appeared at auction: a print from The Gordon L. Bennett Collection sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2004, now in the collection of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and a print from the collection of Dr. and Mrs. Lorenz K. Ng sold at Christie’s New York in 1998.  The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, also owns a small, circular-format print.

Agassiz Rock is located near Union Point, an overlook on the old Four Mile Trail, which ran from the base of Sentinel Dome to Glacier Point. The construction for the Four Mile Trail, the work of James Conway, was not begun until 1871. Now extending beyond four miles, the original trail took nearly a year of arduous work to complete. That portion of the trail leading to Agassiz Rock, tricky to negotiate, is now inaccessible.

Agassiz Rock was named in honor of the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873).  Trained as a physician in his native Zurich, he developed a keen interest in natural history as a student of Cuvier in Paris in the 1830s. Agassiz came to the United States in 1846, and accepted a professorship of geology and zoology at Harvard in 1848.  From that time on, he made his home in America, founding the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and devoting himself to ichthyology in both the waters of the Amazon and the coasts of the United States. 

Although referred to by a variety of names in the nineteenth-century–Tin-Pin Rock, Union Point; The Magic Tower–On the Union Point Trail; and Agassiz Thumb–the name Agassiz Rock may have been coined by Watkins himself.  Watkins photographed Louis Agassiz in 1870 (a carte-de-visite of which is in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D. C.) and may have heard the famed scientist lecture at that time in San Francisco. A genuine enthusiast and, by all accounts, a mesmerizing lecturer, Agassiz embodied the optimism with which science was regarded throughout much of the nineteenth-century.