Hell's Half Acre, Prismatic Springs (c. late 1880s): Art, History and Details

Hell's Half Acre, Prismatic Springs (c. late 1880s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Frank Jay Haynes (American, 1853–1921).

The work and its context

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

Frank Jay Haynes was a photographer of life in the American West and the early days of Yellowstone National Park. Arriving in Yellowstone in the 1880s, he accompanied expeditions into the park, serving as official photographer. From canyon bottoms to mountain peaks, Haynes took his cameras to locations where he could capture unique and artistic views. In this photograph, he documented the immense space of the landscape, made particularly apparent by the inclusion of a small figure standing on the cliff at the right.

Object facts

• Title: Hell's Half Acre, Prismatic Springs
• Date: c. late 1880s
• Creator attribution: Frank Jay Haynes (American, 1853–1921)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from glass negative
• Dimensions: Image: 44.7 x 54.5 cm (17 5/8 x 21 7/16 in.); Paper: 45 x 55.1 cm (17 11/16 x 21 11/16 in.); Matted: 61 x 76.2 cm (24 x 30 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1992.242

Collection credit

Edwin R. and Harriet Pelton Perkins Memorial 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.