Carleton E. Watkins

The Old Book Store, San Francisco

Collection of Gordon L. Bennett, San Francisco (acquired from the above in 1967)

Sotheby’s New York, The Gordon L. Bennett Collection of Carleton Watkins New Series Photographs of Yosemite, 28 April 2004, Sale 7966, Lot 51

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Peter Palmquist, ‘Carleton Watkins: Life and Art,’ Portfolio: The Magazine of Fine Arts, Vol. V., No. 2, New York, March/April 1983, p. 91, illustrated

Weston Naef and Christine Hult-Lewis, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs, Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011, cat. no. 205, illustrated

San Francisco, Focus Gallery, Early Views of Yosemite and the California Missions: Photographs by Carleton E. Watkins from the Collection of Gordon Bennett, November - December 1973

Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; The St. Louis Art Museum; and The Oakland Museum, Carleton E. Watkins: Photographer of the American West, April 1983 - February 1984, pl. 67, illustrated

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, A History of Photography from California Collections, February - April 1989

Monterey Museum of Art, Carleton E. Watkins: Yosemite Photographs, Courtesy of Gordon L. Bennett, June - September 1993

San Francisco Museum of Art; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Washington, D. C., The National Gallery of Art, Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception, May 1999 - April 2000, pl. 40, illustrated

This mammoth-plate albumen photograph was acquired at the landmark sale of The Gordon L. Bennett Collection of Carleton Watkins New Series Photographs of Yosemite, held at Sotheby's New York in 2004. Originally part of an album, likely unique, of forty Watkins ‘New Series’ views, the photograph offered here is believed to be one of only four prints of the image extant. Indeed, Watkins 'New Series' photographs from 1878-81 are not only far scarcer than his earlier work from the 1860s but are also among the last great, large-format photographs made in Yosemite Valley.  

Pictured here are the Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls which, when measured together with the cascades between them, form one of the highest waterfalls in the world: the drop is nearly 2,500 feet from the Yosemite Creek above to the Merced River below. In the present view, taken from near the bottom of Lower Yosemite Fall, the waterfall appears to form an almost continuous line from the high cliffs to the Valley. In reality, the Upper Fall is far taller and far more distant than the photograph indicates.

On his first trip to Yosemite in 1861, Watkins made picturesque, mammoth-plate views of the Falls from a distant viewpoint, sometimes looking across the Merced River, at other times from the wooded Valley floor. In the mid-1860s, however, Watkins' mammoth-plates of waterfalls began to change. In the 'New Series' view of the Yosemite Falls offered here, Watkins' viewpoint is majestic and dramatic: with only a thin wedge of sky at the top to locate the viewer in space, the water rushes forward with cinematic effect. In contrast to his earlier views of Yosemite from the 1860s, the photographs made by Watkins when he returned to the Valley in the late 1870s show a photographer who has evolved from documentarian to masterful artist, working with his mammoth-plate camera in a more conceptual, sophisticated way.  

In their groundbreaking catalogue raisonné Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs, Weston Naef and Christine Hult-Lewis locate only three other prints of this image: the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Yosemite Museum, Yosemite National Park; and a private collection.