Carleton Watkins A Delicate Balance
specialties; he made this difficult practice appear effortless.[23] While no multi-part daguerreotype panorama made at the Benicia steamer landing exists, two individual views showing the same building have survived [Fig. 4]. How convenient it would be if we could prove these two daguerreotypes are missing pieces of the Vance “Catalog” puzzle.
Let us further imagine that Carleton was at the Benicia steamer landing on his way to San Francisco with a specific purpose: to present Vance with the results of the first month or so of work and receive guidance from the financial director of the project. Even further let us imagine that when Vance saw the three dozen or so daguerreotypes views (R.V. 129 to R.V. 93) showing a few main streets, the waterfronts, and landscape views made from elevated positions at hotels and other structures that his response could have been one of disappointment. As there are no mining views found in descriptions of the first thirty or so daguerreotypes, we can imagine Vance asking, “Where are the miners and their diggings?”
The very next item in the “Catalog”, following the view made in Benicia (R.V. 93), is a sequence of views described as being made in the environs of the mining center of Nevada City, located about thirty-five miles east of Marysville. The first Nevada City view (R.V. 92) is described as “Panoramic,” suggesting that, like Benicia (R.V. 93), it was a multi-part sequence made from the same camera position with the camera rotated fifteen or twenty degrees from one exposure to the next. The “Catalog” description for Nevada City (R.V. 92) speaks of the image also showing “. . . the surrounding forest; giving the enormous size to which the trees attain in this region, some of them three hundred feet in height and twenty-seven feet in circumference.” It is doubtful there were ever any three-hundred- foot high trees at the perimeter of Nevada City. The statement perhaps conflates the content of an unlisted tree-portrait daguerreotype, possibly one made in the Sequoia grove near Sonora (R.V. 88-90). Dating from his boyhood in Otsego County, New York, Carleton had a personal interest in trees. Based on the surviving number of tree-portraits in his overall body of work, it is plausible that Carleton would have been drawn to the idiosyncratic subject of trees soon after his arrival in California.
In the first fifty views in the daguerreotype panorama of California series, we already find in the “Catalog” descriptions that are evidence of stylistic patterns typical of Carleton’s mature approach to picture making. It was not just his passion for trees, but also the near-obsessive desire to find the
[23] Naef & Hult Lewis (2011), cat. Nos. 2, 57, 66, 83-84, 90-92, 260-262, 360-364, 365-368, 373-374, 375, 434-436, 442-444, 854-856, 875-876, 882-884, 983-9985, 998-999, 1000-1001, 1022-1023, 1078-1079, 1159-1161, 1164-1167, 1246-1248.