Bridal Veil, Yosemite (1865–66): Art, History and Details

Bridal Veil, Yosemite (1865–66) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829–1916).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The grand scale of the American West was difficult to convey in early photographs, which were intimately scaled objects meant for the hand and the album. Starting in the late 1850s, a handful of photographers shooting landscapes and historical settings began producing “mammoth” prints, including the San Francisco-based Carleton E. Watkins. The seemingly gargantuan scale of these prints allowed a new, immersive relationship between the viewer and the image, enhancing that “you are there” feeling.

Object facts

• Title: Bridal Veil, Yosemite
• Date: 1865–66
• Creator attribution: Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829–1916)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 40.1 x 52.4 cm (15 13/16 x 20 5/8 in.); Matted: 61 x 76.2 cm (24 x 30 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1992.12

A detail from the museum

In the spring, Bridal Veil Falls drops a torrent of rushing water 620 feet down into the Yosemite Valley.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1992.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (February 1993): 38–79.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.