Half Dome, Merced River, Winter, Yosemite Valley

 

Ansel Adams

  1902 - 1984 (biography)

c. 1940 (printed between 1962 and 1971 

gelatin silver print, photograph 

15 5/8 x 19 1/4" image 

pencil, lower right beneath image 

not editioned, special proof 

Carmel studio stamp on verso: "Photograph by Ansel Adams / Route 1, Box 181 / Carmel, California"; "title" in ink; "credit" crossed out; "Date" ca 1940; "Film" blank. 

Label on verso: "Title - 'Half Dome, Merced River, Winter / Yosemite Valley" "Credit" empty "Date" 'Ca 1940' "Film" empty Ansel Adams, My Camera in Yosemite Valley (Boston, 1949), cover Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: Yosemite and the Range of Light  

mounted to illustration board 

 

artist 

24924 

SOLD

This photograph is pencil signed by Ansel Adams in the lower right. The work was originally in a badly damaged frame with a bronze plaque attached which reads “To W. Parmer Fuller III. With Appreciation / and Esteem for Service as Director / Yosemite Park & Curry Co. 1956-1972.” It was given as a retirement gift to Fuller who would have been a close associate of Adams. William Parmer Fuller III (1913-1993) was also a Director of Wells Fargo Bank; Western Pacific Railroad, Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. and a Trustee of Stanford University.

The brainchild of schoolteachers David and Jennie Curry, the Curry Company started out doing business by renting out a few tents in Yosemite in 1899. Curry Camping Company and the Yosemite National Park Company merged to become the Yosemite Park & Curry Company, which was required by the Interior Department to build a luxury hotel in Yosemite Valley that became The Ahwahnee. Donald Tresidder, Mary Curry’s husband, served as the first president of the company.

Half Dome, Merced River, Winter, Yosemite Valley was included in the Ansel Adams Gallery’s “Special Edition Photographs,” printed by Adams’ technical assistant Alan Ross. This image is included in the following books: Ansel Adams, My Camera in Yosemite Valley (Boston, 1949), cover. Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: Yosemite and the Range of Light (Boston, 1979), pl. 21 James Alinder and John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams: Classic Images (Boston, 1985), pl. 22 Andrea Gray Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (Boston, 2007), p. 115 Peter Galassi, Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley: Celebrating the Park at 150 (Boston, 2014), p. 137.