Cactus Gigantea - 18 feet high, San Jose, Santa Clara County, No. 73 from the series "San Jose, Cal."
c. 1868
Medium
Albumen print, stereo
Dimensions
Each image: 8 × 7.7 cm (3 3/16 × 3 1/16 in.); Card: 8.6 × 17.7 cm (3 7/16 × 7 in.)
Classification
stereograph (albumen)
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
103147
Art Historical Context
Thomas Houseworth’s “Cactus Gigantea” captures a towering saguaro-like cactus standing eighteen feet tall in the Santa Clara Valley. Created around 1868 as the seventy-third view in his “San Jose, Cal.” series, the stereograph offers nineteenth-century viewers a vivid glimpse of California’s distinctive landscape just after the Gold Rush era. Houseworth, a San Francisco-based photographer, in producing stereo cards that let armchair travelers experience distant places in three dimensions. The work is an albumen print presented on a standard stereo card measuring roughly 3½ by 7 inches. When v...