Carleton E. Watkins
Yosemite Valley from the “Best General View”

CultureAmerican
Titles
  • Yosemite Valley from the “Best General View”
Date1866
PlaceCalifornia, United States
MediumAlbumen silver print
DimensionsImage: 16 1/4 × 20 1/2 in. (41.3 × 52.1 cm)
Sheet: 16 7/16 × 20 5/8 in. (41.8 × 52.4 cm)
Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Clarke
Object number80.50
Non exposé

Explore Further

Department
Photography
Object Type
Description

By the time Carleton Watkins made this photograph, he was one of the most acclaimed photographers of the American West, known for images celebrating the grandeur of pure, raw nature. In 1861 and on seven subsequent trips to Yosemite Valley, he produced more than 175 mammoth plate photographs and nearly 500 stereograph views, more than in any other single location in his career of more than 50 years. This photograph, made on Watkins’s second trip to the valley, was taken from Mariposa Trail at a location today known as Old Inspiration Point, nearly 3,000 vertical feet above Yosemite Valley, from which he felt “the view looked best.”


 


Working with a custom-built camera and glass negatives measuring 18 by 22 inches, Watkins was a master of the wet-plate collodion process. He transported the contents of a studio—2,000 pounds of gear in total—over 75 miles by mule, a feat that was as expensive as it was arduous. Evading bugs and dust as he poured the sticky collodion emulsion on the unwieldy glass plates (at constant risk of shattering), Watkins sensitized, exposed, and processed his photographs in the field. The labor required for a single image demanded a thoughtful composition; here, Watkins places the slender tree daringly off-center to frame Half Dome while rendering the majesty of Yosemite in exceptional detail.


 

After seeing Watkins’s first Yosemite photographs in 1863, President Lincoln passed the Yosemite Grant, deeding the land to California with the mandate that it be forever maintained in the public domain and laying the groundwork for future national park legislation.
Provenance[Daniel Wolf, Inc., New York]; purchased by MFAH, 1980.
Exhibition History"Past/Present: Photography from the Permanent Collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, December 8, 1991–February 9, 1992.

"The American Landscape East to West: Themes in Painting and Photography, 1780-1910," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, September 6, 2003–January 19, 2004.

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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1974
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2002.4179
Bracelet
David Watkins
1972
Silver and acrylic
2002.4177