Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, once described Carleton Watkins' 1878 trip into Yosemite as a "watershed," both for Watkins' own growth as an artist and for the then-youthful history of landscape photography.
The star of the April 28 sale of the Gordon L. Bennett collection at Sotheby's New York showroom was a knockout Watkins photograph of Agassiz Rock, shown as a looming black form against a distant vista of Yosemite falls. The monolithic rock formation was named for the Swiss physician and naturalist Louis Agassiz, who was instrumental in the early development of American pragmatist philosophy during a teaching stint at Harvard.
