Grizzly Giant, Mariposa Grove - Carleton E. Watkins (1861)

Mariposa Grove

Albumen silver print

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This photograph depicts the Grizzly Giant, a colossal giant sequoia in Mariposa Grove within what is now Yosemite National Park, captured by American photographer Carleton E. Watkins in 1861 as an albumen silver print. Watkins carefully framed the massive trunk so that its crown was isolated against an open sky, a compositional strategy that conveyed the tree's overwhelming scale to Eastern audiences who had never witnessed such a landscape. The image belongs to a celebrated series of mammoth-plate views that Watkins made of Yosemite, which were exhibited at Goupil's gallery in New York in 1862 and are credited with influencing President Abraham Lincoln's landmark 1864 decision to protect Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove. Watkins's photographs of the Grizzly Giant became foundational documents in both the history of American landscape photography and the early conservation movement, inspiring subsequent painters such as Albert Bierstadt and driving scientific interest in the giant sequoias.