Sothebys Carleton Watkins Yosemite Photos {RARE} Start Price USD 24.99 Current Price USD 24.99 Time Left - Bid Count 0 Buy It Now Price USD 29.99 Reserve Price - Start Time Monday, September 01, 2008 End Time Monday, September 08, 2008 Location Saratoga Springs N.Y. 12866 See more about 'Sothebys Carleton Watkins Yosemite Photos {RARE}' Description     YOU ARE BIDDING ON A CATALOG(S)          Title: Sotheby's The Gordon L. Bennett Collection of Carleton Watkins New Series Photographs of Yosemite  Auction held in: New York Sale Date:  4/28/04 No. of Lots: 64 No. of Pages: 78 Condition:  Excellent Please Note: Great Write-Ups on each Lot           Sotheby's in this sale offered an important group of photographs of Yosemite by Carleton Watkins in a single-owner session from The Gordon L. Bennett Collection. The 40 photographs, acquired by Bennett in a rare book store in San Francisco in 1967, were made during the approximate years 1878-1881 and are in exceptional condition, each with its original mount and the Watkins "New Series" letterpress label. The sale includes some of Yosemite's most celebrated landmarks, such as Agassiz Rock and the Yosemite Falls, From Union Point (est. $100/150,000), pictured above, and The Half Dome, From Glacier Point Yosemite (est. $100/150,000), pictured on page 2. The exhibition will travel to the Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco from March 25 - 27 and to Sotheby's Los Angeles from March 30 - April 1, and then it will precede the auction at Sotheby's New York from April 23 to April 27. The collection is estimated to bring in excess of $1 million. "We are thrilled to be offering the Gordon L. Bennett Collection of Carleton Watkins 'New Series' photographs of Yosemite this season," said Denise Bethel, Senior Vice President and Director of Sotheby's Photographs Department. "Surmounting hardships of the great outdoors, Watkins produced a pioneering photographic record of the West coast of America. One of the first to capture, with a camera, the grandeur of the American West, Watkins was famous for his prize-winning views of such places as Yosemite, San Francisco, California's gold-mining country and Oregon's Columbia River region. " (Pictured above: The Half Dome, From Glacier Point Yosemite, est. $100/150,000) Gordon L. Bennett became a passionate collector of photographs while a graduate student in 1960, combing antique shops and book stores in Northern California. In 1967, he found this large group of albumen prints hidden on the bottom shelves of a rare book store on San Francisco's Sutter Street. The shop's owner told Bennett that the photographs, originally bound together in an album, were still a complete set. Bennett said: "I remember the excitement I felt as I examined the prints...I knew that somehow I had to have these unfamiliar photographs, for I intuited that they were rare." (Pictured below: Yosemite Falls, From Glacier Point, Yosemite, est. $100/150,000) Like many young men of his day, Carleton Watkins moved to San Francisco during the height of the Gold Rush, in 1851, and for a number of years he worked as a photographer there. When he visited Yosemite for the first time in the 1860s, he was inspired by the sheer magnitude and scale of the landscape and set out to capture its majesty in his work. Highlighting the collection are Agassiz Rock and the Yosemite Falls, From Union Point (est. $100/150,000), and The Half Dome, From Glacier Point Yosemite (est. $100/150,000), which reveal the area's grand proportions. The splendor of Yosemite's waterfalls are depicted in Yosemite Falls, View From the Bottom, Yosemite (est. $100/150,000) and Yosemite Falls, From Glacier Point, Yosemite (est. $100/150,000). Describing Watkins' technical achievement, Ms. Bethel said: "Watkins worked in seemingly impossible conditions to capture these images, traveling over wilderness trails with cameras, lenses, sheets of glass, dark tents and chemicals. Maneuvering all of his equipment over the dangerous terrain by mule demanded great endurance and strength. The heavy glass negatives, measuring 18 by 22 inches, required the immediate application of a wet collodion emulsion out-of-doors, and once these were finished, he had to transport the negatives back to San Francisco to be contact-printed and mounted, an equally labor-intensive endeavor." (Pictured above: Yosemite Falls, View From the Bottom, Yosemite, est. $100/150,000) Despite these remarkable challenges, Watkins' works are considered to be one of the greatest achievements in nineteenth-century photography, capturing Yosemite's sublime and startling beauty. His works were so compelling that they persuaded Congress to sign the 1864 bill protecting the region, leading to the creation of the national park. One year later he opened the Yosemite Gallery in San Francisco. The years that followed brought economic hardship for Watkins and he lost his gallery in the 1870s. For this reason, Watkins quickly started to take a "new series" of photographs, returning to many of the sites he had previously visited. In 1906, though, his entire collection of negatives was destroyed in the fire following the San Francisco earthquake. (Pictured on page 2: Vernal Fall, 300 Ft. Yosemite, est. $50/80,000) The Watkins "New Series" Yosemite photographs from Bennett's collection are among the finest examples of these "New Series" Watkins photographs and have been exhibited numerous times. The entire group of Yosemite photographs was shown at Focus Gallery, the pioneering San Francisco photography gallery, in 1973; and highlights were shown in the major Watkins retrospective organized by the Amon Carter Museum, in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1983, which traveled to several museums across the United States. Sixteen photographs from the group were exhibited at the Monterey Museum of Art in 1993. Most recently, a selection was included in the Watkins exhibition organized by Douglas Nickel for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999. Credit: Sotheby's Press          Because auction catalogs are printed in limited numbers they become collectible right after the sale of that particular auction. 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