Yo-semite Valley, photographic views of the falls and valley of Yo-semite in Mariposa County, California

Watkins, Carleton E., 1829-1916 · 1863

From catalogue raisonné: One of the special categories of photography in which Watkins excelled was the copying of two-dimensional sources, such as daguerreotypes, paintings, drawings and maps... In 1863, some friends of the writer of Ernest Frignet (1823-?)... commissioned the San Francisco calligrapher Fulgenzio Seregni to create a drawing for the title page to accompany the set of thirty 1861 Watkins photographs to be included [in a portfolio prepared for Frignet]. Watkins copied Seregni's ink-on-paper drawing with his mammoth-plate camera and used these prints, such as the one reproduced here, as title pages for later sets of Yosemite photographs.