Cathedral Mesa, Colorado River
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1986
Accession Number
1986.1054.34
Art Historical Context
In 1871, Timothy H. O'Sullivan captured *Cathedral Mesa, Colorado River* during the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Wheeler Survey, a government expedition mapping the uncharted American West. This stark, monumental landscape photograph depicts the towering Cathedral Mesa along the Colorado River, evoking the sublime grandeur of the desert Southwest. O'Sullivan, a pioneering photographer who honed his craft during the Civil War under Mathew Brady, brought his documentary precision to these expeditions, transforming raw wilderness into visual testimony of America's expanding frontier. Printed as...
About the Artist
Timothy H. O'Sullivan · 1840–present
Timothy H. O'Sullivan (c. 1840–1882) was a pioneering American photographer whose unflinching lens captured the raw devastation of the Civil War and the sublime vastness of the untamed West. Born in New York City—or possibly Ireland, with his family migrating soon after—his early life remains sparsely documented. As a teenager, he apprenticed under Mathew Brady at the famed daguerreotype studio on...