Lower Yosemite Falls - Yosemite Valley California - B&W Photograph by Carleton E. Watkins c.1865 - Japanese Unryu Rice Paper Art Print (Unframed) 18 x 24 in

Pacifica Island Art uses an environmentally-friendly Unryu Japanese rice paper made by the Awagami Factory in Tokushima, Japan. Unryu, which translates to 'cloud dragon paper' in Japanese, features long strands of kozo fiber and is made from natural mulberry and hemp fibers using traditional Japanese Washi techniques - ABOUT THE ARTIST - Carleton E. Watkins - Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916) was an American photographer of the 19th century. Carleton E. Watkins came to California around 1851 from the small New York town of Oneonta, one of a hundred thousand hopeful young men migrating west that year in search of Gold Rush fortune. In the boomtown of San Francisco, he fell into photography by chance when asked by a local daguerreotypist to stand in for a missing employee. A natural adept, he soon established his own business fabricating outdoor photographs for land-dispute cases and mining interests. After his first photographic expedition to Yosemite in the summer of 1861, Watkins's name was made, and for the nearly half a century that followed he defied the vicissitudes of fortune and commerce to create what are surely the finest American landscape photographs of the 19th century. In wide-ranging travels across the length and breadth of the frontier West, Watkins energetically balanced a practical need to characterize the land before him with his craftsman's pride in a picture plumbed and mitred to perfection. His work was exhibited extensively and won medals in expositions throughout the United States and Europe. Following the loss of his entire studio in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, Watkins became ill and destitute, and in 1910 he was committed to a hospital for the insane.