PBA Galleries

Lithograph broadside with eight views and brief descriptive text. 43.5x65 cm (17¼x25¾") plus margins. Matted and framed, overall 72.5x92.5 cm (28½x36½"). 

First printing with proprietors given as Lapham & Haynes. Thomas A. Ayres arrived by ship at San Francisco on August 8, 1849. Little is recorded about his first year activities in California, but it is believed that he was in the Sierra Nevada mining region. In 1850 he returned to San Francisco with sketches of the mining district. During the next few years he traveled to different parts of the state to draw and paint. According to Harry T. Peters, California on Stone, the California "drawings, made on the spot, have artistic merit and place Ayres in the front rank of the draftsmen of the period." In 1855 James Mason Hutchings asked the artist to accompany him on his first trip to Yosemite Valley. The small party, Hutchings, Ayres, and two others, arrived in the valley in June 1855 and spent five days there. Ayres spent most of his time making sketches with carbon pencil or black crayon and the group left the valley with six drawings, the first pictorial representation of Yosemite. In October 1855, one of these drawings was published by Hutchings as a lithograph titled The Yo-Hamite Falls. It was the first published view of Yosemite Valley to reach the general public. From his Yosemite sketches Ayres painted a panorama of the "Yosemite Valley and Falls" which he exhibited in 1855 at McNulty's Hall in Sacramento. In 1856 Ayres returned to Yosemite via Coulterville and made additional pencil drawings of the valley. The following year these drawings were exhibited at the Art Union in New York. Ayres' work was brought to the attention of Harper and Brothers who engaged him to illustrate a series of articles on Southern California. In April 1858, while sailing from San Pedro, California to San Francisco on the schooner "Laura Bevan," Ayres drowned when the ship and all on board were lost in a storm near Point Dume. Peters, California on Stone (1935) plate 74 (first printing).