Davoncastle Butte, Sierra Nevada (c. 1866–1870): Art, History and Details

Davoncastle Butte, Sierra Nevada (c. 1866–1870) 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:

From the medium’s beginnings in the 1830s through the 1880s, most photographs were intimately scaled objects meant for the hand, the album, and the home. As the medium began being used to document landscapes and monuments in the 1850s, larger scale processes arose such as the glass-plate negative. The mammoth print truly seemed gargantuan in the 1860s. For much of the 20th century, the 8-x-10-inch gelatin silver print was the norm for photojournalism; these prints were destined for reproduction in books and magazines around the same scale.

Object facts

• Title: Davoncastle Butte, Sierra Nevada
• Date: c. 1866–1870
• Creator attribution: Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829–1916)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 40.5 x 54.8 cm (15 15/16 x 21 9/16 in.); Matted: 55.9 x 71.1 cm (22 x 28 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1988.87

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.