Yosemite Valley from Mariposa Trail (c. 1865): Art, History and Details

Yosemite Valley from Mariposa Trail (c. 1865) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Charles Leander Weed (American, 1824–1903).

The work and its context

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

In 1859, Charles L. Weed made the first photographs of the wild and breathtakingly beautiful Yosemite region in California. These pioneering photographs spoke of the area's splendors to future visitors and artists. Probably five years later, he returned to Yosemite to begin creating his remarkable mammoth plate views (roughly 17x22 inches). This celebrated vista of the distant, mountainous, forest scene is the best known of Weed's modest production of large-scale photographs. The serenity and order of the composition is punctuated by an isolated, spindly tree perched at a cliff's edge, asymmetrically dividing the composition while uniting the blank sky with the mountainous landscape below. The figure leaning against the tree in the foreground gives scale to the scene and suggests human isolation in the vastness of nature.

Object facts

• Title: Yosemite Valley from Mariposa Trail
• Date: c. 1865
• Creator attribution: Charles Leander Weed (American, 1824–1903)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: mammoth albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 39.7 x 51.7 cm (15 5/8 x 20 3/8 in.); Mounted: 55.6 x 71 cm (21 7/8 x 27 15/16 in.); Matted: 71.1 x 81.3 cm (28 x 32 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2002.43

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hinson, Tom E. "Iconic Images." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 47, no. 6 (July/August 2007): 3-6.

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.