1882 Tinted Lithograph of "The Temples & Towers of the Virgen"
By: William Henry Holmes (drawings) Julius Bein (Lithographer)
Date: 1882 (published) New York, NY
Dimensions: 17.75 x 30.50 inches (45 x 77.5 cm)
This is an amazingly detailed & accurate view of Zion Canyon, in southern Utah, from Edward Dutton's Atlas of the "Grand Canyon District." Dutton was born in Wallingford, CT, on May 15, 1841, graduating from Yale in 1860. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and then joined the U.S. Geological Survey. He worked in a number of places, including Hawaii, Oregon, and the American Southwest, in particular surveying the Grand Canyon. In 1882, he issued his Atlas of the Grand Canyon survey, a magnificent document of the exploration of one of the last surveyed parts of the United States.
The views were based on first-hand drawings by William Henry Holmes (1846-1933), who accompanied dutton on his survey. Holmes had first worked with Ferdinand V. Hayden, on the first survey of the state of Colorado, but his images of the Grand Canyon reached an unprecedented level of quality and realism. They are without a doubt, some of the best images of the West made in that period of American exploration.
William Goetzmann wrote that Holmes was "the greatest artist-topographer and man of many talents that the West ever produced...his artistic technique is like no other's. He could sketch panoramas of twisted mountain ranges, sloping monoclines, escarpments, plateaus, canyons, fault blocks, and grassy meadows, that accurately depicted hundreds of miles of terrain...his illustrations for Dutton's 'Tertiary History of the Grand Canon District' are masterpieces of realism and draftsmanship as well as feats of imaginative observation."
In the center of the picture is the western temple. To the right of it is the Mukuntuweap Fork or Little Zion Valley, and across it is the eastern temple. On the extreme right is the opening of the Parunuweap. In the middle distance is the inner Canyon of the Virgen.
Condition: This beautifully tinted lithograph is in A condition with warm beige colors, bordered in a thin black frame
Inventory #12285
1932 S. Halsted #200 Chicago, IL 60608 (312) 496-3622