+ Expand

Dimensions: 21 1/4 by 15 1/4 in. (54 by 38.7cm.)

+ Expand

Provenance: The Old Book Store, San Francisco, 1967

+ Expand

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

Focus Gallery, San Francisco, Master Photographers: A Sentimental Celebration, November 1981

Amon Carter Museum, Carleton E. Watkins: Photographer of the American West, April - May 1983; and thereafter to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, June - August 1983; The St. Louis Art Museum, September - October 1983; and The Oakland Museum, December 1983 - February 1984

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 Modern Art, Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception, May - September 1999, and thereafter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 1999 - January 2000; and the National Gallery of Art, February - April 2000

+ Expand

Literature: Charles Wollenberg, "Pictorial Resources: Carleton E. Watkins Photographs," in the California Historical Quarterly, Volume LIII, No. I, Spring 1974, p. 85 (this print)

Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins, Photographer of the American West, p. xv and pl. 66 (this print)

Nickel, Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception, pl. 41 (this print)

David Anfam et al., Clyfford Still (New Haven: Yale University Press, in conjunction with the Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2001), p. 35 (this print)

Other prints of this image:

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

+ Expand

Notes: Agassiz Rock was named in honor of the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, and was called by a variety of names in the nineteenth century. Naef and Wood reproduce a Muybridge stereo view from the 1870s that carries the printed caption, Ten-Pin Rock, Union Point; and a Houseworth & Co. stereo view with the caption, The Magic Tower?On the Union Point Trail (figs. 79 and 81). Browning points out that the name Agassiz Column was used by J. M. Hutchings in his 1886 volume, In the Heart of the Sierras; and mentions the use of Agassiz Thumb by others (op. cit., 'Old Fanciful Names').

The name Agassiz Rock may have been coined by Watkins himself. This dramatic mammoth-plate view is one that would have been difficult for Watkins to make when he first visited the Valley in the 1860s. The 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 of 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 (cf. Browning, op. cit., p. 47; Schaffer, op. cit., pp. 166-7; and Russell, op. cit., p. 78.)

A small, circular-format view of Agassiz Rock made by Watkins at roughly the same time as the present image is reproduced as the cover illustration for Weston Naef's In Focus series volume on the photographer (J. Paul Getty Museum, In Focus: Carleton Watkins, Los Angeles, 1997). Using this image as a prime example, Naef calls Watkins's 1878 trip into Yosemite an 'artistic watershed,' in which the photographer began to see the landscape with new eyes (ibid., p. 60). As Martha Sandweiss has commented, the present photograph of Agassiz Rock, 'with its clear, sharply defined background and massing of near and distant forms, exhibits a self-confidence' not found in an earlier photograph of the rock attributed to Watkins (in Palmquist, op. cit., p. xiv).

Louis Agassiz (1807-73) was trained as a physician in his native Zurich, but in the 1830s, as a student of Cuvier in Paris, he developed a keen interest in natural history, a subject that would occupy his talents and intellect for the better part of his career. 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. Watkins may have heard the famed scientist lecture in San Francisco in 1870; we know that he made a photograph of Agassiz, reproduced in carte-de-visite format in Naef and Wood, fig. 82.

The singularly striking Agassiz Rock, poised high over the sweeping Yosemite Valley, was a fitting tribute to the enormous reputation that Agassiz enjoyed in his adopted country. 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.