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Dimensions: measurements note 15 1/8 by 20¼ in. (38.4 by 51.4 cm.)

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Provenance: Private CollectionAcquired by Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, from the above, 1988Acquired by the Quillan Company from the above, 1989

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

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Notes: 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.